NEW YORK, NY.- Now celebrating its 32nd year, the annual Museum Mile Festival takes place rain or shine on Tuesday, June 8, 2010, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Well over one million people have taken part in this annual celebration since its inception. Festival attendees can walk the Mile from 82nd Street to 105th Street and visit nine of New York City ’s finest cultural institutions open free that evening to the public. In addition, several of the participating museums offer outdoor art activities for children.

The Museum Mile Festival’s opening ceremony takes place at 5:45 pm at El Museo del Barrio ( Fifth Avenue between 104th and 105th Streets), celebrating its reopening year as well as its 40th anniversary. Traditionally, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and other city and state dignitaries open the Festival.

El Museo del Barrio; The Museum of the City of New York; The Jewish Museum; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Neue Galerie New York; Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art are the nine institutions participating in this highly successful collaboration. (The Goethe-Institut New York has moved to an interim location.)

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 museums. Additional street entertainers perform along Fifth Avenue all evening. Exhibitions on view include: Retro/Active: The Works of Rafael Ferrer, the first retrospective to examine the breadth and depth of the Puerto Rican-born artist’s work over the last 55 years, part of El Museo del Barrio’s FOCOS series highlighting groundbreaking, mature, under-recognized artists; Cars, Culture and the City, spotlighting New York City’s role in staging, romanticizing and promoting the car and in creating America’s “Car Culture,” at The Museum of the City of New York; Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey, a dramatic story of escape and survival, along with original drawings of Curious George and other characters, at The Jewish Museum; The National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?, exploring the work of designers addressing human and environmental problems across many fields of the design practice, from architecture and products to fashion, graphics, new media, and landscapes, at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, representing a diversity of 65 emerging, mid-career, and well-established artists of many generations, at the National Academy Museum; Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, examining ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and underscoring the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession with accessing the past, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Otto Dix, the first one-man museum exhibition of works by this major German artist ever held in North America with more than 100 masterpieces focusing on the period between 1919 to 1939, at Neue Galerie New York; and Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a landmark exhibition of the Metropolitan’s holdings of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics by the artist—never before seen in their entirety—as well as an extensive selection of his prints, exploring the full breadth of Pablo Picasso’s artistic genius through 250 works.

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 www.museummilefestival.org.

Exhibitions on View:

El Museo del Barrio: Retro/Active: The Works of Rafael Ferrer; Voces y Visiones: Four Decades Through El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection

Museum of the City of New York : Cars, Culture, and the City; America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York , 1966--1973

The Jewish Museum: Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey; Modern Art, Sacred Space: Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb; South African Photographs: David Goldblatt; South African Projections: Films by William Kentridge; Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey; and for children, Archaeology Zone: Discovering Treasures from Playgrounds to Palaces

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum : National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?; Ted Muehling Selects: Lobmeyr Glass from the Permanent Collection

National Academy Museum: The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance; The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Julie Mehretu: Grey Area; Malevich in Focus: 1912–1922; A Year With Children 2010: Learning Through Art; Hilla Rebay: Art Educator; and Thannhauser Collection

Neue Galerie New York : Otto Dix

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art