[NYguy]

NY Sun

‘Museum Mile' Expands

By KATE TAYLOR
February 9, 2007

The Museum for African Art yesterday unveiled the design for its future home on Fifth Avenue, at the northeast corner of Central Park, to an audience that included Mayor Bloomberg and the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer. When it opens in 2009, the museum, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, will be the first new major arts institution on "Museum Mile" since the Guggenheim opened in 1959.

"Because of the incredible diversity of New York, I've always said that you can see the world on a single subway fare," Mr. Bloomberg said at the unveiling, held at the Guggenheim Museum. "Now you can see the world's art on a walk down Fifth Avenue."

The location, between 109th and 110th streets, will put the Museum for African Art at the "symbolic crossroads where Harlem meets Museum Mile," its director, Elsie McCabe, said. The building will occupy 90,000 square feet, with 16,000 square feet of gallery space, a restaurant, a theater, an education center, conservation and storage facilities, and a dramatic roof garden overlooking 110th Street. Ground will be broken in the spring, and the museum will open in its new building in 2009, which will be its 25th anniversary.

The museum is on a capital campaign to raise $80 million, which will include $10 million to create an endowment. With gifts from trustees, $12 million from the city, and the sale of air rights to the developers of a residential tower that will rise above the edifice, the museum has so far raised almost $50 million.

The museum, which was founded in 1984 to promote appreciation of African art and culture, has spent the past two decades in rented spaces on the Upper East Side, in SoHo, and, most recently, in Long Island City. Its exhibitions have traveled to institutions around the country and abroad. In its new building, for the first time, the museum will have a home for its permanent collection and for its extensive education programs.

The journey to yesterday's announcement was a long one, revealing both the power and the perils of arts-business partnerships. The museum was originally going to develop the Fifth Avenue site, which consists of five lots, with Edison Schools Inc. Edison was to relocate its headquarters there, and build a flagship school with an Afrocentric curriculum based in part on the museum's educational programs. But in 2002, Edison saw its stock price plummet, and it pulled out of the partnership. That left the museum with a short time in which to buy both the lot Edison owned and the four adjacent cityowned lots.

A $9 million loan from the Community Preservation Corporation, led by Michael Lappin, enabled the museum to move quickly on purchasing the lots. Later, with the help of the chairman of the museum's building committee, John Tishman, it found new partners in the residential developers Brickman Associates and Sidney Fetner & Associates. By selling them the air rights to build a 19-story condominium — picture it as a Museum Tower for East Harlem — the museum was able to defray the costs of the land, as well as the construction and development.

Like those at Museum Tower, which rises above the Museum of Modern Art, the units in the condominium will be market-rate. "We paid nearly $17 million for all the land," Ms. McCabe said. "The only affordable housing is for the museum's home."

The addition to Museum Mile of a museum dedicated to African art and culture is a major event, the New York City cultural commissioner, Kate Levin, said. Museums "play a psychological role: They help us map out what culture is, what aesthetics are," she said.

The museum's education programs at its new home will include a semester-long afterschool program called "Passport to Africa," in which students will come to the museum one day a week to learn about African art and culture. Part of the program will involve studying a replica of an African village, town, or city, which the museum will construct and reinstall twice a year.

Ms. McCabe acknowledged that museums of Western art do not make so much effort to put their collections in a cultural context, since that context is familiar to most of their audience. But children "learn comparatively little about Africa, to the point that many still ask us if there is electricity in Africa, do people wear clothes," Ms. McCabe said, while adults associate Africa with war, famine, and plagues. The museum seizes every opportunity to change such stereotypes, she said. "Pride in being African-American and respect for those who are, is made easier if there is a fundamental appreciation of Africa — its art, its culture, its past, its future."