Museo de América

The Museo de América (English: Museum of America) is a Spanish national museum of arts, archaeology and ethnography in Madrid. Its collections cover the whole of the Americas and range from the Paleolithic period to the present day.

The museum was established by the Spanish State and its initial pieces came from the former collection of American archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from the National Archaeological Museum, Madrid and the Prado Museum, as well as exhibiting a number of unrelated donations, deposits and purchases. It has a major collection of 18th c. casta paintings, one by Miguel Cabrera, who created a set of 16 large format casta paintings. The museum's most famous painting is by Mexican artist, Luis de Mena, of the Virgin of Guadalupe and castas on a single canvas.

History

The institution was founded by a decree of 19 April 1941 and opened in 1944 inside the building housing the National Archaeological Museum. After all the initial holdings were moved to a newly built premises in the Ciudad Universitaria, the building was inaugurated on 12 October 1965. After a series of renovations of the building, which was previously shared with a number of unrelated institutions, the museum was reopened on 12 October 1994, this time exclusively occupying the entire building. As part of preparation for the re-opening, a collecting programme was established, with artifacts from Spain's first Caribbean settlement on Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) found by anthropologist Soraya Aracena.

Collection

The permanent exhibit is divided into five major thematic areas:

• An awareness of the Americas
• The reality of the Americas
• Society
• Religion
• Communication

See also

• Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid), also featuring American pieces

References

• García Sáiz, Mª Concepción; Jiménez Villalba, Félix (2009). "Museo de América, mucho más que un museo" (PDF). Artigrama. 24 (24). Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza: 83–118. doi:10.26754/ojs_artigrama/artigrama.2009247698. ISSN 0213-1498. S2CID 257308144.
• Krizmanics, Georg T. A. (2018). "El Museo de América de Madrid: ¿un instrumento para la política exterior española?". A Contracorriente. 15 (2): 39–61.

External links

• Northwest Coast art in the Museo de América
• Official website