Museums - El Museo del Barrio

El Museo del Barrio was founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican educators, artists, parents, and community activists in East Harlem’s Spanish-speaking El Barrio. It has evolved into New York’s leading Latino cultural institution, having expanded its mission to represent the diversity of art and culture from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. From the outset, El Museo defined itself as an educational institution and a place of cultural pride and self-discovery for the founding Puerto Rican community. Initially El Museo operated in a public school classroom as an adjunct to the local school district. Between 1969 and l976, El Museo moved through a series of temporary spaces, and in 1977 it found a permanent home in the spacious, neoclassical Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, where it is now an important stop on Manhattan’s Museum Mile.
El Museo possesses an extremely varied, 8,000-object collection of Caribbean and Latin American art. The works range from pre-Columbian vessels to contemporary installations. The pre-Columbian holdings feature approximately 2,000 domestic and ceremonial objects from the pre-contact cultures of the Caribbean, including the Igneris, Caribs, and Taíno. The latter is the second-largest collection of its kind in the United States. El Museo’s traditional arts collection of 900 objects, secular and religious, includes musical instruments, miniature houses, dolls, nativity scenes, and masks from Chile, Brazil, Peru, Haiti, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The outstanding Santos de Palo collection is of national significance. It includes 360 santos (carved wooden saints used for household devotion), primarily from Puerto Rico.