Museum Mile Festival to Offers Free Museum Admission & More, 6/10

Now celebrating its 36th year, the annual Museum Mile Festival (www.museummilefestival.org) takes place rain or shine on Tuesday, June 10, 2014, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Over 1.5 million people have taken part in this annual celebration since its inception. Festival attendees can walk the Mile on Fifth Avenue between 82nd Street and 105th Street while visiting nine of New York City's finest cultural institutions, which are open free to the public throughout the evening. The Museum Mile Festival's opening ceremony takes place at 5:45 pm at The Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street). Traditionally, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and other city and state dignitaries open the Festival.

Fifth Avenue is closed to traffic and becomes a strollers' haven. Special exhibitions and works from permanent collections are on view inside the museums' galleries and live music from jazz to Broadway tunes to string quartets is featured in front of several of the museums. Additional street entertainers perform along Fifth Avenue all evening. El Museo del Barrio; The Museum of the City of New York; the Jewish Museum; the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; National Academy Museum & School; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Neue Galerie New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The Africa Center are the nine institutions participating in this highly successful collaboration.

Exhibitions on view include: MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care, exploring the unusual founding of El Museo del Barrio and soliciting community participation to create unorthodox museums of the moment, at El Museo del Barrio; City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection, the first exhibition of New York graffiti art from the 1970s and '80s, the Museum of the City of New York; Other Primary Structures, featuring sculptures by artists working in the 1960s in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa and reexamining the historic Jewish Museum show Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (1966) from a global point of view, at The Jewish Museum; Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, featuring over 300 works between 1909 and 1944, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Annual 2014: Redefining Tradition, bringing together multiple generations of National Academicians to illuminate affinities, connections, differences, and a relevant continuum of American art and architecture, at the National Academy Museum & School; Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937," devoted to "Entartete Kunst," the infamous display of modern art organized by the Nazis as a part of the Third Reich's campaign to denounce various genres of art, at Neue Galerie; Charles James: Beyond Fashion, the inaugural exhibition of The Costume Institute's new Anna Wintour Costume Center, examining the career and design process of the influential Anglo-American couturier Charles James (1906-1978), at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Established in 1978 to increase public awareness of its member institutions and promote public support of the arts, the Museum Mile Festival serves as a model for similar events across the country. For further information, the public may call 212-606-2296 or visit the festival Web site at MuseumMileFestival.org.