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Tel: (505) 246-2261
Fax: (505) 246-2613

State of New Mexico
Office of Cultural Affairs
Hispanic Cultural Division

600 Central Ave. SW
Suite 201
Albuquerque, NM 87102

May 18, 2000

Mr. Naul Ojeda
3813 Upton Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20016

Dear Naul:

As you know, after fifteen years at the Smithsonian I left the National Museum of American Art to join the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. The Center will highlight the Visual. Performing, Media, Literary, and Culinary Arts from across the Hispano/Latino world. As Senior curator for the Visual Arts Program I hope to continue some of the worked on Latino art that I started at the Smithsonian. We will be organizing original exhibitions, building a permanent collection, and hosting traveling exhibitions. While we have no acquisition funds at this point, Dr. Helen Lucero, Director of Visual Arts, and I will be working to secure such funds in the future. 

The Center is currently under construction on a 16-acre site on the bank of the Rio Grande just south of downtown Albuquerque. The museum building will include more than 11,000 square feet of gallery space, a sculpture garden, collections storage space, a conservation lab, a photography studio, exhibitions preparation space, a construction shop, a museum store, a lecture hall, and staff offices. This building will also include recording and broadcast studios as well as the administrative offices for the entire center. We will open to the public in October of this year. At that same time, our literary arts research facility (which will include a genealogical research component and a restaurant) will also open in a renovated WPA adobe schoolhouse. In subsequent years the performing arts complex (with three theaters), and outdoor theater, and the culinary arts facility will be complete and opened to the public. 

The museum for visual arts will open with three exhibitions. All three of the exhibitions will remain on view until May of 2001. One will focus on the history and the people of Barelas, the Albuquerque neighborhood where the center will be located. The second exhibition will focus on the work of New Mexican photographer Miguel Gandert. I will be organizing the third exhibition that will showcase the
  
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