New-York Historical Society and El Museo del Barrio Join Forces for Nueva York

Written by Ross Henderson Monday, 26 April 2010 19:51

NEW YORK, NY.- The New-York Historical Society and El Museo del Barrio this week announced details of their major upcoming collaboration, Nueva York—the first exhibition to explore how New York’s long and deep involvement with Spain and Latin America has affected virtually every aspect of the city’s development, from commerce, manufacturing and transportation to communications, entertainment and the arts. Organized by the two institutions, Nueva York will be on view from September 17, 2010, through January 9, 2011, at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street), while the New-York Historical Society’s landmark building on Central Park West undergoes a $60 million architectural renovation.

Serving with the curatorial team as Chief Historian for the exhibition is Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Gotham.

Bringing together the resources of New York’s oldest museum and its leading Latino cultural institution, this unprecedented exhibition will span three centuries of history: from the founding of New Amsterdam in the 1600s as a foothold against the Spanish empire to the present day, as represented by a specially commissioned documentary by award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns. Nueva York will bring this story to life with hands-on interactive displays, listening stations, video experiences and some 200 rare and historic maps, letters, broadsides, paintings, drawings and other objects drawn from the collections of the two museums, as well as from many other distinguished institutions and private collections.

Among the experiences offered in the exhibition’s galleries will be:

• maps and interactives showing the vast networks of the Atlantic world in the 17th century, with its competing Spanish, Dutch, English and French shipping routes and colonial harbors;
• tools and artifacts of the trade between New York and South America, including a clipper ship model, navigation instruments, silverware, powder horns and slave shackles;
• paintings and books by New York artists and writers such as Washington Irving, Frederic Church and William Merritt Chase, who were deeply affected by their travels in Spain and South America;
• Spanish-language newspapers and books published in New York in the 19th century, and Spanish-language guidebooks to the New York of that period;
• military uniforms, political documents, paintings including a portrait of McKinley by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller, and propaganda posters reflecting years of Latin American political struggles and U.S. interventions;
• an interactive listening station, allowing visitors to sample the Latin music of New York;
• artworks by modern Latin American artists including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres-García, reflecting their images of New York;
• and the Nueva York Theater, an art installation by Antonio Martorell (based on La guaga aérea / The Air Bus, by Luis Rafael Sánchez) showing Ric Burns’s specially commissioned documentary that tells the stories of Latino New Yorkers from 1945 to the present.

Voces y Visiones: Four Decades Through El Museo del Barrio's Permanent Collection, will be on view concurrently, giving visitors a deeper understanding of Latino presence in American culture. The exhibition traces the institution’s history from its founding in 1969 and the artistic contributions and milestones by Latino, Caribbean and Latin American artists that have been part of El Museo’s forty-year trajectory.

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