The exhibition “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart. El Museo was founded half a century ago, in a politically agitated time, in Puerto Rican East Harlem, the Barrio. That move to what is now called Museum Mile — the moniker was invented by one of El Museo’s early directors, Jack Agüeros — carried the germ of battles to come. An institution that had initially been a showcase for Puerto Rican art, which was unwelcome by other city museums, started to open its doors to a wider range of Latinx (the gender-neutral term for Latino/Latina) and Latin American art. Its board of trustees, once recruited from the working-class barrio, began to diversify ethnically, economically and socially.

Source: New York Times June 20, 2019 21:45 UTC