Mainstream American museums have only just begun to accept that in contemporary American culture, there are many houses. Even today this recognition is not shared by everyone. But the situation has certainly improved since 1969, when New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted its hideously condescending exhibition "Harlem on My Mind." Back then the Met confidently declared that spending $5,544,000 on Velazquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, his dark-skinned assistant of presumed Moorish ancestry, would improve the self-esteem of the museum's black and Hispanic public.
$ Institutions such as the long-established Museo del Barrio and the newer Museum of Contemporary...
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