Something Beautiful is El Museo del Barrio’s most ambitious presentation of its unique, complex, and culturally diverse Permanent Collection in over two decades. The exhibition is the result of a multi-year research project dedicated to re-evaluating El Museo’s wide-ranging holdings, collected over the course of the intuition’s more than fifty-year trajectory. Organized based on newly conceived typologies, Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección cuts across traditional chronological, stylistic, and media-specific categories to reflect an innovative approach to Puerto Rican, Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American cultural production and identities. Drawing from El Museo del Barrio’s own history and legacy, these concepts offer a rich panorama that explores African and Indigenous heritages, urban experiences, self-representational strategies, craft intersections, and beyond.

The title, Something Beautiful, draws from a print in the collection by artist Marcos Dimas with a poem of the same name by Tania Niomi Ramirez. The work both celebrates and invokes the challenges of political, cultural, and historical inheritances, and as such, metaphorically reflects larger ideas proposed by this new reframing of El Museo’s Permanent Collection. 

Something Beautiful is organized by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator, Susanna V. Temkin, Curator, and Lee Sessions, Permanent Collection Associate Curator. The show is the result of a collection initiative titled Identity Reimagined: Reframing La Colección, during which the Museum engaged over 40 professionals in dialogues around the potentialities of the institution’s collection. The exhibition will highlight over 500 artworks, presented through two rotating displays divided into thematic sections. Something Beautiful will include new acquisitions, historical highlights from the collection, as well as numerous rarely seen artworks. New commissions will also debut, with artists Maria Gaspar and Glendalys Medina to be featured in the first rotation.

Exhibition Date: May 19, 2023 - Mar 10, 2024

Hours of Operation:

Thursday - Sunday, 11am – 5pm

Mon-Wed: Closed

Location: El Museo Del Barrio

1230 5th Avenue

New York, NY 10029.

Suggested Admission

(Pay-What-You-Wish) 

$9 Adults

$5 Students and Seniors

Free for Members and children under 12

We strongly recommend purchasing online tickets in advance. A limited number of same-day timed tickets will be available for purchase on a first-come, first-served basis.

RESERVE TIMED TICKET

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