Museum for African Art

The Museum for African Art is located in the neighborhood of Long Island City in the borough of Queens in New York City (USA). Founded in 1984, the museum is “dedicated to increasing public understanding and appreciation of African art and culture.” The museum is also well know for its public education programs that help raise awareness of African culture, and also operates a unique store selling authentic hand-made African crafts.

Begun as the Center for African Art, the Museum for African Art’s founding director was Susan Mullin Vogel, who had previously worked as Associate Curator in the Department of Primitive Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During her time at the Museum for African Art, Vogel curated and organized ground-breaking exhibitions which put into question ways in which African art is presented to Western audiences, and how museum practices structure knowledge for the public. The most well-known of these exhibitions are “Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections” in 1988, “Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art” in 1994, and “Africa Explores: 20th-Century African Art” in 1991.

Move and expansion

The museum will be moving in 2008 to its permanent new home [1] on Museum Mile at the corner of Fifth Avenue and E. 110th Street in the borough of Manhattan, near the neighborhood of Harlem. The new location, in a building designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, will make the museum accessible to a wide range of people with backgrounds from the world over, thus solidifying the museum’s presence as one of the most challenging and diverse art institutions in the U.S.