Review: Museum of the Americas

The museum houses objects from pre-Columbian times that are several thousand years old as well as colonial objects and 20th-century objects of native Americans, many of them beautiful and informative.

The framing of the accompanying texts and their concept of history is outrageous though. Problems of the commons American and Spanish history since 1492 are barely expounded. 18th-century paintings showing racial typologies are displayed without comment on their racist content or their context. The later parts of the recommended tour deal with aspects of culture of the Americas like “marriage”; it is quite odd to see topics dealt with for the area of countless different cultures on two continents in thousands of years.

Fortunately most objects have labels with a title, material description, origin and inventory number, sometimes also a descriptive note.