El Museo del Barrio Announces Hispanic Heritage Month Programming

Photo Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio

As communities across the country celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, El Museo del Barrio — the nation’s leading museum dedicated to Puerto Rican, Latine, and Latin American art and culture — invites audiences to experience a vibrant season of exhibitions, public programs, and cultural events that honor the richness, creativity, and diversity of Latine artistic expression. 

The museum presents a robust lineup of artist talks, film screenings, family programs, educator workshops, performances, community conversations, and beloved annual traditions, including Día de Muertos, alongside two major exhibitions: Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics and the New York presentation of the traveling exhibition Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art. Together, these programs and exhibitions celebrate the artists, ideas, histories, and communities that continue to shape Puerto Rican, Latine, and Latin American culture while inviting visitors to engage with art as a catalyst for dialogue, discovery, and connection. 

“Public programs have the power to transform museums from places people visit into places where communities gather,” said Arturo Agüero, Director of Education and Public Programs at El Museo del Barrio. “As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, this season offers opportunities for audiences of all ages to connect through art, dialogue, and cultural traditions while celebrating the creativity and resilience of Puerto Rican, Latine, and Latin American communities.” 

PUBLIC PROGRAMS 

Noches de Cine | New Latino Short Films 

Thursday, September 24, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | Free 

Register here 

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, this special edition of Noches de Cine steps outside the feature format for a single night of short films from across the Americas. Different countries, different generations of filmmakers, different ways of working with the camera — together, tracing a hemisphere’s worth of Latine and Latin American storytelling, one short film at a time. 

Book Launch | Julia Alvarez: In the Time of the Butterflies 

Monday, September 14, 2026 | 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM | Tickets: $5 or $30 with book 

Register here 

More than thirty years after its original publication, In the Time of the Butterflies continues to inspire readers around the world. Join author Julia Alvarez for a conversation celebrating the book’s new illustrated adaptation and the enduring stories at its heart. 

El Museo After Dark | Disco and Desire 

Friday, September 18, 2026 | 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM | $10.00 

Register here 

Inspired by Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, this after-hours celebration brings together Latino disco, dancing, and late-night gallery experiences. Explore the exhibition, hit the dance floor, and immerse yourself in the music, style, and nightlife that shaped Sandoval’s creative world. 

The Armory Show  

September 24 – 27, 2026 | The Javits Art Center  

A cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since 1994, The Armory Show opens New York’s fall art season by bringing the world’s leading international contemporary and modern art galleries to the Javits Center each year. The fair emphasizes thoughtful programming, elevated presentations, curatorial excellence, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations. 

El Museo del Barrio is honored to be this year’s Armory Spotlight Recipient. Through its nonprofit booth, El Museo will highlight its mission and history, present work by María Lúcia “Lulu” Varona Borges, and invite fairgoers to participate in the creation of one of the artist’s textile pieces on site at The Armory Show. The presentation will also provide an opportunity for El Museo to connect with collectors, curators, artists, and new audiences from around the world during one of the art world’s most significant annual gatherings.  

Book Launch | Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop 

Friday, October 9, 2026 | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM | Free 

Register here 

Celebrate the release of Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the counterpart catalogue to  El Museo del Barrio’s 2025 exhibition of the same name. Join artist Candida Alvarez and catalogue contributors Zuna Maza, Assistant Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and Adriana Zavala, Chair of the History of Art and Architecture Department at Tufts University, as they discuss various  aspects of Alvarez’s artistic trajectory and relationship with El Museo (where she was employed earlier in her career) covered in the publication. The discussion will be moderated by Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, Curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). 

En Conversación | Making Latinidad 

Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Free 

Register here 

What does Latinidad mean today, and who gets to shape its future? Bringing together artists, writers, educators, organizers, and cultural leaders, this public conversation explores how ideas of Latinidad are created, challenged, and transformed across culture, politics, and everyday life. 

En Familia | Día de Muertos 

Saturday, October 17, 2026 | 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM | Free 

Register here 

Join El Museo del Barrio’s annual Día de Muertos celebration featuring art-making activities, live music, community altars, and family-friendly experiences. Together, we honor and remember loved ones who have passed while celebrating the traditions, stories, and memories that continue to connect generations. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics 

On view through November 15, 2026 

Press Preview: 10:00 AM on September 9, 2026. RSVP here

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics, an exhibition inspired by a significant project from the museum’s history by artist, poet, and Exit Art co-founder Papo Colo. The show is anchored by a recent gift to El Museo’s Permanent Collection of several panels from Colo’s Octopus: An Act of Sculpture (1982). First staged in El Museo’s courtyard in 1982, the piece consists of an accordion-style book sculpture. Presented at El Museo for the first time in more than four decades, Octopus & Others showcases the power of collaboration between artists and poets and artworks that embrace and subvert the book form and its function. 

Each “page” of Octopus was made onsite by an artist and/or poet from New York City’s uptown and downtown scenes that Colo invited to contribute.  The resulting participatory sculpture represented an anthology of the various currents in poetry and art of New York’s artistic ecosystem of the early 1980s. Participants included writers and poets such as Nicholasa Mohr and Pedro Pietri, alongside artists Vito Acconci, David Hammons, Tehching Hsieh, Catalina Parra, and Juan Sánchez, among others. Octopus not only reflected Exit Art’s interdisciplinary and multicultural ethos but also underscores El Museo’s role within New York’s alternative cultural network and its longstanding commitment to experimentation, innovation, and cultural exchange. 

With Octopus Colo centered the collaborative gesture and the transformation of the book into sculpture. Taking this as a point of departure, Octopus & Others brings together cross-generational contributions of artists and poets that share its collaborative ethos. Furthermore, this grouping of collection works, archival materials, and select loans, showcases artistic practices that have embraced and reconsidered the book form in response to shared social, political, and environmental concerns. 

The exhibition is curated by El Museo del Barrio’s Assistant Curator, Zuna Maza. 

Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art

September 10, 2026 – January 10, 2027 

Press Preview: 10:00 AM on September 9, 2026. RSVP here

El Museo del Barrio is proud to be the only New York venue for Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, opening September 10, 2026, a major exhibition examining the life and work of Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), an innovative yet historically underrecognized artist whose practice explored gender, sexuality, identity, and belonging with humor and political urgency. Rooted in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicane artistic communities, Sandoval’s work engaged the social and cultural movements shaping the United States and Latin America from the 1970s through the 1990s. 

Curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, the exhibition takes its title from Butch Gardens, a gay bar in Los Angeles frequented by Sandoval and fellow Chicane patrons in the early 1970s. Sandoval adopted the bar’s name for the fictional “Butch Gardens School of Art,” a conceptual framework through which he fostered collaboration, experimentation, and creative community while challenging traditional art world structures. 

Expanding beyond a conventional retrospective, the exhibition places Sandoval’s work in dialogue with a multigenerational group of queer, Latine, and Latin American artists whose practices share related visual languages and political concerns. Spanning photography, painting, drawing, collage, conceptual art, and performance, the exhibition foregrounds interconnected histories of queer and diasporic artistic production across the Americas. 

For El Museo del Barrio’s presentation, additional loans and artworks from the museum’s collection expand on the themes of self-fashioning and gender presentation in the exhibition. These additional artworks also draw the east and west coasts into closer conversation with material that examines queer spaces and queer art in New York City during the period that Teddy Sandoval was working in Los Angeles. 

The traveling retrospective is organized by Independent Curators International (ICI) and developed in partnership with Williams College Museum of Art and Vincent Price Art Museum. El Museo’s presentation is overseen by Lee Sessions, El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collections Associate Curator. 

SPONSORS: 

Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics, Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art and other programs at El Museo del Barrio are supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Major private support for exhibitions and programs at El Museo is provided by The AG Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Ford Foundation, Getty Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Maestro Dobel Tequila, Mellon Foundation, Morgan Stanley, Paul Hastings LLP, Teiger Foundation, and Terra Foundation for American Art, along with El Museo’s Board of Trustees and numerous additional foundation, corporate, and individual supporters. 

ABOUT EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO

El Museo del Barrio is the nation’s leading Latine and Latin American cultural institution. The Museum welcomes visitors of all backgrounds to discover the artistic landscape of these communities through its extensive Permanent Collection, varied exhibitions and publications, bilingual public programs, educational activities, festivals, and special events.  

The Museum is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street in New York City. The Museum is open Thursdays through Sundays from 11:00am – 5:00pm. Pay-what you can. To connect with El Museo via social media, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For more information, please visit www.elmuseo.org.