New York, NY, October 12, 2000--- El Museo del Barrio announces Taíno: Ancient Voyagers of the Caribbean, an important new permanent exhibition that opens Thursday, October 26, 2000. The installation will continue the success of El Museo's 1997-98 exhibition, Taíno: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean, which attracted the largest audience in the museum's history. The new Taíno exhibition includes about 125 important Taíno works from major institutions, private collections and the museum's holdings. (See enclosed Exhibition Walkthrough).

Taíno: Ancient Voyagers of the Caribbean presents rare and beautiful objects in stone, ceramic, shell and bone that illustrate diverse spheres of Taíno culture: mythology and cosmology, religion and ancestor worship, chiefs and chiefdoms, festivals and ball games, navigation and astronomy, ceramics and cuisine and daily life and technology. The Taíno, the first people Columbus encountered in the New World, evolved about A.D. 1200 from an intermingling of groups that had migrated into the Caribbean many centuries earlier, primarily from the Orinocan-Amazonian Basin of South America. The Taíno became the dominant culture in the region and lived on the large islands of the Greater Antilles: the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

The exhibition was organized by Dr. Dicey Taylor, Guest Curator, coordinated by Fatima Bercht, Chief Curator of El Museo del Barrio, and designed by Ted Anderson and Donna Ostraszewski, of the Gallery Association of New York State, Hamilton, N.Y. An illustrated brochure and educational video will accompany the exhibition. Contemporary photographs also document the Taíno legacy through the survival of ancient customs in the Amazonian region and the Greater Antilles. An interactive computer database and lecture series are also planned for the coming year.

Taíno: Ancient Voyagers of the Caribbean includes important loans from major public and private collections: The American Museum of Natural History, (New York, N.Y.); The National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, (Washington, D.C); Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, (Recinto Río Piedras, P.R.); El Museo del Barrio, (New York, NY); Fay Collection; Collection of Peter David Joralemon; Collection of Florence and Brian Mahony and anonymous lenders. Of particular note is the Deminán Caracaracol, a masterpiece of Taíno art lent by the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, (Washington, D.C). (See attached press release for more details).

Taíno: Ancient Voyagers of the Caribbean is made possible by generous support from The Chase Manhattan Foundation, its major sponsor. Additional funding has been provided by: The Achelis Foundation; Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky; The Reed Foundation; Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Museum Accessibility Initiative; City of New York, Department of Cultural Affairs; Office of the Manhattan Borough President, C. Virginia Fields; National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Coucil of the Arts; and anonymous donors.

The mission of El Museo del Barrio is to establish a forum that will preserve and project the cultural heritage of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.

Museum hours: Wed. through Sun. 11 to 5 p.m. Suggested contribution: $4 adults; $2 students and seniors; children under twelve accompanied by adults and members enter free.

El Museo del Barrio may be reached by subway: #6 to 103rd Street station; or by bus: M1, M3, M4 on Madison and Fifth Avenues to 104th Street; local cross-town service between Yorkville or East Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan M96 and M106 or M2.