El Museo del Barrio is getting ready to co-host the city’s 48th annual Museum Mile Festival, which this year takes place on Tuesday, June 9.
“Museums sometimes feel like scary places,” Arturo Agüero, El Museo del Barrio’s director of education and public programs, acknowledged to the AmNews. “They seem like they’re too expensive; some of us feel we don’t speak the language. The architecture itself can sometimes feel hostile. And my job as the director of education and public programs is to hold the doors open and invite people in, meet them where they’re at –– literally on the street –– and say, ‘Come on, this is for you, this is with you.’”
El Museo del Barrio’s hosting plans are to turn its section of Museum Mile, in front of its building at 1230 Fifth Avenue (between E. 104th and 105th Streets), into a Puerto Rican block party as a semi-homage to its current exhibitions, “Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021–2025” and “Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures.” There will be dance activities, bilingual guided tours, hands-on art-making tables, and live music from the all-women salsa orchestra Lulada Club, as well as mixes of hip hop, cumbia, and Caribbean music by DJ Bembona.
The Museum Mile Festival is an annual event that brings traffic-free arts programming to Fifth Avenue from 110th to 82nd Street. The event began in 1978 as a joint effort to boost public support for the arts and get new audiences interested in entering museums that they might normally think cater to them.
“For us,” Agüero said, “we are connecting with people through music, through art making, through refreshments, you name it.” He noted that the all-female musical lineup for their event relates to El Museo’s current exhibitions. “This speaks to some of Sophie Rivera’s perspectives on feminism, on womanism, and sort of wanting to advocate for visibility and representation. She was advocating for visibility in terms of being a woman and being a Latina woman.”
Other works on view in the museum also confront the often-circumscribed views of Latinidad, Agüero added. “Some of the language I see in both of these exhibits resists the single image of what a Latina looks like. They both push strongly against that. They also pull from a wider conversation with history to show that Latinos don’t just exist as historical objects but are also part of the layers of modernity and futurism.”
El Museo is using its festival co-hosting moment to point to how Puerto Rican and Latino artistic and cultural traditions have impacted New York City’s culture. “We can learn about art as we dance in the middle of a block party,” Agüero said. “We can learn about art: that not all art is serious, that some art is silly, it’s provocative, it’s confusing, it can be a lot of different things. And I think some of these public programs encourage that kind of engagement wherever people are and wherever there’s art.”
The Museum Mile Festival is free of charge and runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., rain or shine. Festival participants can visit exhibitions, watch outdoor performances, and take part in museum-staged activities up and down Fifth Avenue. Other participating museums along the route include The Africa Center (5th Ave at 110th St), Museum of the City of New York (5th Ave at 103rd St), The Jewish Museum (5th Ave at 92nd St), Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (5th Ave at 91st St), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (5th Ave at 89th St), Neue Galerie New York (5th Ave at 86th St), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (5th Ave at 82nd St). For more info, visit elmuseo.org.
