Closed to the public for nearly five years, after a period of renovations still to be completed in 2022, “The Hispanic Society Museum and Library” reopens and features from opera to historical sculptures from Spain and America of Spanish language. The building is based in a Beaux-Arts enclave called Audubon Terrace overlooking the Hudson in Washington Heights, and its gallery walls are famously hung with paintings by Goya, Velázquez and Zurbarán.

The word “Hispanic” adopted to name the museum/library used to mean especially “Iberian” at the time of its foundation. As mentioned in our critical analysis in October, 14, the meaning of the term has been changing due to debates promoted in recent decades.

The sculpture exhibition “Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh” is composed of “two dozen religious works — seven by women — dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries, most gathered by civil society. Italy was the stylistic source for most of this work, since many Spanish artists did an apprenticeship there. But the Roman Catholic art developed in Spain, and later passed on to, or imposed on, the Americas, was, formally and emotionally, a world of its own, a world little acknowledged by major museums. 

It is worth quoting the review published by The New York Times here for more information.