“Museum Starter Kit: Open With Care” Exhibition
El Museo del Barrio
This event has ended.
El Museo del Barrio, now celebrating its 45th anniversary, reimagines its beginnings with MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care, an exhibition that explores the unusual founding of El Museo and solicits community participation to invent new museums—creating unorthodox museums of the moment. The exhibition is designed to grow and change over time.
The inventor of El Museo, its founder in 1969, was Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934, Brooklyn, New York), a pivotal artist in the 1960s Destruction in Art movement. MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care draws inspiration from Montañez Ortiz in revisiting the idea of a museum, its invention, and reinvention today—especially as El Museo del Barrio embarks on a new chapter in its history. The exhibition underscores the museum’s historic capacity for and reliance on openness, generosity, and care in serving and being served by diverse communities. It also understands the ironic “destruction” of old rules to create new institutions—an understanding of conditions in the 1960s as well as a symbol of the museum’s current renaissance.
The “starter kit” proceeds in four steps. The first prominently features works by Montañez Ortiz, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. The second step features the New York-based collective BroLab and their modular edifice, Stack and Rack, a multipurpose public sculpture that functions as a socially interactive space. The third step offers a reflection on past and future artists of El Museo and features renowned artists including performance artist Papo Colo and photographer/filmmaker Perla de Leon. For the fourth step, El Museo has partnered with a group of local artists and neighbors from El Barrio (East Harlem) to invite community members to bring objects from their homes for display in the museum’s galleries. The “kit” concludes with having visitors exit through the BroLab space, allowing them to reflect again on the overall process.
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Schedule
from March 12, 2014 to September 13, 2014