New York, 10 March 2011
The African Art Museum in New York received a donation of three million dollars from the Ford Foundation. The grant has been given to the museum in order to complete its new building located on Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. The museum will open its doors in autumn 2011.
In recognition of the foundation’s generosity, one of the museum’s wings will be named “Ford Foundation Lobby”. The foundation hereby joins the list of important benefactors that includes David Rockefeller, John Tishman and the Walt Disney Company. 76 M$ have thus far been raised for the 90 M$ project.
The Museum of African Art is internationally renowned aa a distinguished source of exhibitions and publications pertaining to traditional and contemporary African art. Since its opening in 1984, the Museum has been on the Upper East Side from 1984 to 1992, in Soho from 1992-2002 and finally in Long Island City in Queens. In 2002, the museum briefly closed in order to focus on organizing larger exhibitions.
The prestige conferred by Fifth Avenue will allow the museum to link the Northern part of the “Museum Mile” with Harlem, an important historical and contemporary centre of Afro-American culture.