Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists records

Established in 1969 as a division of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists is an art museum dedicated to the education, promotion, exhibition, and collection of African, Caribbean, and Afro- American fine arts worldwide.  It is one of only two Afro-American art museums in the United States, and it is the only art museum in New England dedicated exclusively to African, Caribbean, and Afro American fine arts.  The museum's collection includes prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and artifacts of African masks and terra cottas.

The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists has offered educational programs to promote and teach the history of Afro-American fine arts to children and adults, including a lecture series, art camps, internships, a Kids' Fair, and the Mobile Museum, an innovative educational program of the 1970s, that brought artwork to public school children.

Exhibitions have included such topics as the contemporary art of Senegal, Jamaican art, Christian art in Ethiopia, and a retrospective of Allan Rohan Crite's work. Since 1969 the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists has had an association with the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, Mass.).  Their first collaborative exhibit in 1970, Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, was at that time the largest and most comprehensive exhibition on the work of contemporary Afro-American artists shown to the American public.  In 1980 the museum moved from 122 Elm Hill Avenue to its new location at 300 Walnut Avenue, Roxbury, Massachusetts.  In 1994 the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists opened its first permanent exhibition, Aspelta: A Nubian King's Burial Chamber.