Museum for African Art moving to Long Island City

On the Net:

www.africanart.org

www.noguchi.org

www.moma.org

Temporary move

By Katherine Roth ~ The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Three months after the Museum of Modern Art's temporary move to Queens, another Manhattan museum is crossing the river.

The Museum for African Art has closed its downtown galleries to reopen just across the East River next month, a museum spokeswoman said Thursday.

"The museum came to SoHo 12 years ago when the area was the warehouse and art gallery district that Long Island City is today," said spokeswoman Yuko Miki. "MoMA definitely started the trend toward Queens, but now it's on the radar of the art community. When MoMA opened, a huge amount of people attended, and that's encouraging."

The new location is only four blocks from MoMA, at the 33rd Street stop of the No. 7 subway train.

Like MoMA, the museum considers the move a necessary step toward an eventual better location in Manhattan -- and a way to reach out to a new community in the process. The museum is building a permanent home at the northern end of the Museum Mile, on Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th streets, where it will reopen in 2005.

"Harlem is a natural for us because it's a meeting point between the African American community, the Latino community and the Museum Mile," Miki said. The new location will be five stories high and include an auditorium, a roof garden, a museum cafe and other facilities neither the locations in SoHo or in Queens could provide.

In the meantime, its galleries and programs for schools and the public will operate from a 12,500 square-foot space -- about the same area as in SoHo -- on the third floor of a building on 43rd Avenue in Queens. It will be one floor above the Isamu Noguchi Museum's temporary home. Like MoMA, the Noguchi museum is awaiting the renovation of its permanent space.

The Noguchi museum, unlike the other two, has always been in Queens; it has temporarily moved from one building there to another.

The three museums, along with the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Socrates Sculpture Park and the American Museum of the Moving Image, are linked by a shuttle bus that makes a loop on weekends between the institutions and MoMA's permanent location on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

Although the Museum for African Art closed its Soho galleries on July 28, its store and offices will remain open there through August. The store will reopen in Queens, along with the galleries, on Sept. 19.

To entice visitors, it will offer an opening exhibit, "Facing the Mask," displaying African masks from private collections alongside a separate display of art from the museum's own collection.