Extra Credit #4 : Museo del Barrio, MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care

Museo del Barrio, MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care
Suggested donation $5 for students
Hours:  Wednesday through Saturday from 11:00am to 6:00pm






Some quotes about the project from the website:

The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with my own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio.-Raphael Montañez Ortiz

"To create a contemporary parallel to Montanez Ortiz’s open and generous vision, El Museo has invited a group of local artists from East Harlem to in turn invite the people of East Harlem to bring objects from their homes for display in the museum’s galleries. This reversal of expected museum exhibition practice underscores the museum’s commitment to creating connections with its audiences but also its interest in interrogating the role of the museum, the potential of the object and the human impulse to collect."

Answer these questions in essay form and post on you blog with documentation shots of your chosen works. 


1. What do you think about Raphael Montañez Ortiz's mission to represent the Puerto-Rican-American and East Harlem community in a museum space? How is this presentation of art different that the story of modern art presented at MOMA (museum of modern art)? 

2. Pick one artwork in the museum, describing it physically and how it was made. How do the materials and the process communicate something about the community, culture, or neighborhood of East Harlem? 

3. Pick one object or group of objects that was provided by the community (non-artists). Describe if physically. Why you think the individual chose these objects, and what it represents about about their culture or neighborhood history/

4. What do you think about this idea of asking the community to contribute objects that are important to them for the museum? Do you think that museum curation should be left to people with the training, should be totally crowd-sourced, or a combination of both? 


This is worth 2 blog posts and i missed class!