Met Museum's ¡Fiesta! Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month With Programs and Performances, 9/24

¡Fiesta! Celebrating Hispanic and Latin American Culture-an all-day, museum-wide celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month with an emphasis on family programming-will be presented on Saturday, September 24, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Museum's Multicultural Audience Development Initiative and Education Department. The Met's second annual ¡Fiesta! will feature programs for all ages from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m., offering visitors art-making activities, talks, music performances, and other engaging programs related to Pre-Columbian, Spanish, and Latin American art from the Metropolitan Museum's collection. All of the ¡Fiesta! events are free with Museum admission.

Events and Programs
The festivities begin at 11 a.m. on the Metropolitan's front steps with a procession led by performers from the band Mariachi Real de México into the Great Hall of the Museum. From there visitors can join a number of different Family Programs taking place throughout the day, including intergenerational How Did They Do That? demonstrations focusing on both Spanish armor and Andean featherwork; Storytime in Nolen Library featuring books written in Spanish and in Spanish and English; and artist-led Drop-in Drawing workshops for all ages in the Vélez Blanco Patio, the Met's Spanish courtyard. In addition to these activities, there will also be an Early Music Foundation Performance of 17th-century Spanish music and dance at 12:30 p.m., which will be set against the Museum's dramatic Spanish Choir Screen in the Medieval Galleries, and a Salsa Dance Workshop at 2:30 p.m. with dancers and an instructor from Ballet Hispanico. At 3:30 p.m., Mariachi Real de México will lead a second procession, this time from the Great Hall to the Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium for Mexico in the Heart, a two-hour musical performance led by Jeff Nevin, featuring soprano Mónica Abrego, tenor Jose Luis Duval, The Villalobos Brothers, Mariachi Academy of New York, and Ballet Folklorico Raíces de México.

This event is made possible in part by Colgate-Palmolive Company.

General Event Information
¡Fiesta! program information and directions to events throughout the Museum will be available at the Information Desk inside the main entrance at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, and in the Uris Center for Education, which is reached from the ground-floor entrance at Fifth Avenue and 81st Street. All ¡Fiesta! programs are free with Museum admission. Recommended Museum admission is $25.00 for adults, $17.00 for seniors (65 and over), $12.00 for students. Children under 12 accompanied by an adult are free.

About the Metropolitan Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and finest museums, with collections of nearly two million works of art that span more than 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 5.68 million visitors last year and is New York City's number-one tourist attraction.

The Multicultural Audience Development Initiative began more than 10 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.