29th annual edition
29th annual edition
Now celebrating its 29th year, the annual Museum Mile Festival will take place rain or shine on Tuesday, June 12, 2007, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Well over one million people have taken part in this annual celebration since its inception. Festival attendees can walk the Mile from 82nd Street to 105th Street and visit nine of New York City's finest cultural institutions open free that evening to the public. In addition, several of the participating museums will offer outdoor art activities for children.
The Museum Mile Festival’s opening ceremony will take place at 5:45 pm in front of the National Academy Museum (Fifth Avenue at 89th Street). Traditionally, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and other city and state dignitaries have opened the Festival.
El Museo del Barrio; The Museum of the City of New York; The Jewish Museum; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; National Academy Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Neue Galerie New York; Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art are the nine institutions that participate in this highly successful collaboration.
Fifth Avenue will be closed to traffic and become a strollers' haven. Special exhibitions and works from permanent collections will be on view inside the museums’ galleries and live music from jazz to Broadway tunes to string quartets will be featured in front of each museum. Additional street entertainers will perform along Fifth Avenue all evening.
Exhibitions on view will include: the recently opened New Greek and Roman Galleries, the culmination of a 15-year plan at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to reinstall its superb collection of classical art in a soaring new space; MASH by German Photographer THOMAS DWORZAK. part of Magnum’s 60 years anniversary celebration, at Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center;
Van Gogh and Expressionism, which explores the crucial influence of Vincent van Gogh on German and Austrian Expressionism, at Neue Galerie New York; The Shapes of Space, which explores various ways in which artists from the early modern period through the present have conceived of and represented space—from spiritual or utopians visions of space, to investigations of built spaces, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum;
The 182nd Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, featuring over 200 contemporary works ranging from figurative to abstraction, covering many different styles and mediums within the categories of painting, sculpture, works on paper, and architectural renderings and models, at the National Academy Museum; Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006, presenting the most innovative designs at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006, at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum;
The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, the first American survey of the influential sculptor’s work since 1980, including 66 sculptures and works on papers, as well as two room-size masterworks, at The Jewish Museum; Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, which tells the stories of New Yorkers who came to engage passionately in global politics in this tumultuous era, through photographs, letters, uniforms and weapons, works of art, and archival footage, at the Museum of the City of New York;
and The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos), which presents visual artists' responses to the tens of thousands of persons who were kidnapped, tortured, killed and "vanished" in Latin America by repressive military dictatorships during the late-1950s to the 1980s, at El Museo del Barrio.
Established in 1978 to increase public awareness of its member institutions and promote public support of the arts, the Museum Mile Festival has served as a model for similar events across the country.
Exhibitions on view:
El Museo del Barrio: The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos)
Museum of the City of New York: Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War; The Jewish Daily Forward: Embracing an Immigrant Community and Costumes and Characters: the Designs of Alvin Colt
The Jewish Museum: The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend; Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art; Landslide; Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey; and for children, Our Great Garden: Nurturing Planet Earth
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum: Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006, Design for the Other 90%
National Academy Museum: The 182nd Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: The Shapes of Space; Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy; A Year with Children 2007: Selected Works from Learning Through Art; Solomon’s Gift: The Founding Collection of the Guggenheim, 1937–1949; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum: Restoring a Masterpiece
Neue Galerie New York: Van Gogh and Expressionism
Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center: MASH by German Photographer THOMAS DWORZAK.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New Greek and Roman Galleries
For further information:
212-606-2296
http://www.museummilefestival.org
Press contacts Events Office:
Alex Wittenberg 212-423-3271
Nora Fussner 212-360-4248
Christine Williams 212-369-4880