Event Date: September 25, 2010
Event Time: 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, Manhattan
¡Fiesta! Celebrating Hispanic and Latin American Culture, will be presented on September 25, 2010 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Museum's Multicultural Audience Development Initiative and its Education Department. ¡Fiesta! is the Metropolitan's first Museum-wide, all-day event in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, and it features programs for all ages from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. ¡Fiesta! offers visitors art-making activities, talks, Museum tours, music and dance performances, films, and many more engaging programs related to Latin American art from the Metropolitan Museum's collection. Nearly all the ¡Fiesta! programs are free with Museum admission.
Daytime Programs
The festivities begin at 10 a.m. with native American dances and a procession on the Museum's front steps by Cetiliztli Nauhcampa Quetzalcoatl in Ixachitlan performers, who will also talk about art and dance in the galleries between 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. Family programs include a treasure hunt related to Hispanic and Latin American culture from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., storytime in Spanish and English from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and drop-in art-making activities from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Other highlights are: drawing sessions for all ages from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; a demonstration of the Cuatro, a traditional Latin American instrument, at 2 p.m.; tango lessons at 3 p.m.; and a mariachi band procession at 4 p.m. There will be special Museum tours for ¡Fiesta! in Spanish at 10:30 a.m., 2 p.m., and 5 p.m., and in English at 12 p.m.
¡Fiesta! also features film programs for various ages: animated family films in Spanish with English subtitles from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., presented in collaboration with the Havana Film Festival New York; Diego Rivera: I Paint What I See at 11:35 a.m.; and Latin Music USA: The Salsa Revolution at 12:45 p.m. In addition, at 2 p.m, Cinema Tropical will screen a documentary film on five contemporary Mexican women singers, Hasta el Ultimo Trago...Corazón (Till the Last Drop...My Love) (2005), followed by a discussion with Carlos A. Gutiérrez, co-founding director of Cinema Tropical, and Claudia Norman, director of the Celebrate México Now Festival.
Evening Concerts
In the evening, the Museum will host two special ¡Fiesta! musical programs. At 5:30 p.m., the Musica de Camara String Orchestra, which has been presenting Puerto Rican and Hispanic classical musicians in concert for more than 30 years, will perform a selection of works by Hispanic composers in the Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Tickets to the concert are $20 and include free Museum admission on September 25. To order tickets for the Musica de Camara concert, call 212-570-3949, visit the Museum's Box Office, or go to www.metmuseum.org/tickets.
At 7:30 p.m., an energetic performance by the urban bachata duo Loisaidas will take place at in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Hailing from Manhattan's Lower East Side, Aquiles Nunez (songwriter and vocalist) and longtime friend Isaiah Parker (producer) are known for their transformations of most popular forms of today's Latin music.
General Event Information
¡Fiesta! program information and directions to events throughout the Museum will be available at the Information Desk inside the main entrance on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, and in the Uris Center for Education, which is reached from the ground-floor entrance on Fifth Avenue at 81st Street. All ¡Fiesta! programs are free with Museum admission, with the exception of Musica de Camara's orchestral performance. Recommended Museum admission is $20.00 for adults, $15.00 for seniors (65 and over), $10.00 for students. Children under 12 accompanied by an adult are free. A complete schedule of ¡Fiesta! programs also can be found on the Museum's website: http://www.metmuseum.org/fiesta.aspx
Dining operations throughout the Museum will be celebrating ¡Fiesta! with Latin-inspired entrees, soups and desserts in the Cafeteria and the new American Wing Café. Specialty cocktails, such as a prickly pear margarita, will be featured in the Great Hall Balcony Bar, Cantor Roof Garden, and Petrie Court Café and Wine Bar.
¡Fiesta! Celebrating Hispanic and Latin American Culture is made possible in part by the Great Circle Foundation.
Additional support provided by Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center and Uris Brothers Foundation Endowment.
El Diario La Prensa is the newspaper sponsor of this program.
About the Metropolitan Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and finest museums, with collections of more than two million works of art that span 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. The Metropolitan Museum, located at the edge of Central Park along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, received 5.24 million visitors last year and is New York City's number-one tourist attraction.
The Multicultural Audience Development Initiative began more than ten years ago at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It reflects the Museum's founding mission to educate and inspire by reaching out to all of its constituencies, including the many diverse communities of the New York Tristate area. Its objectives are to increase awareness of the Museum's encyclopedic collections and programs, to diversify its visitorship and Membership, and to increase participation in its programs.
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September 14, 2010
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