ABSTRACT
The history of El Museo del Barrio, New York is complex. Its founding was closely connected to both the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for decentralized educational and artistic resources. In 1969, artist and teacher Raphael Montañez Ortiz reconceived an invitation to create educational materials for the dominant Puerto Rican population of East Harlem. Instead, his proposal for “El Museo del Barrio” envisioned a multimedia museum, active with programming that spanned from pre-Columbian to contemporary art. El Museo organized its first exhibitions in public schools, operated briefly from a brownstone and storefronts, and has been located since 1977 in the mixed-use Heckscher Building. At the western edge of Spanish Harlem and the top of Fifth Avenue’s “Museum Mile,” El Museo’s galleries occupy only 7,500 square feet, or half the ground floor. Although there have been serious discussions of moving to a larger space, El Museo renovated and reopened in the same building in 2010. The institution is disproportionate in symbolism and impact to its modest size and to the expanding population it alone represents. Despite its meager space, the institution has offered space for successive generations of Puerto Ricans to define themselves in the mainland, while fostering diverse Latinx participation, as discussions of Latinidad are increasingly pertinent. Somehow exceptional, El Museo del Barrio has continually reinvented itself through success and struggle, maintaining its relevancy while projecting the artists who define our understanding of Latinx art.
