Museo Afro Casa Silvana, a new museum for Afro-descendant art opens in Puerto Rico

A new museum for Afro-descendant art is emerging in Puerto Rico. Formerly known as Casa Silvana, a self-managed cultural model, reopens as the Museo Afro Casa Silvana (MACAS) in response to the lack of an Afro museum on the island. It thus becomes the only museum in Puerto Rico dedicated exclusively to the collection, exhibition, and study of Afro-descendant art.

"Casa Silvana has evolved, not only creating the first library of Afro-Puerto Rican art and its collection of Afro-Puerto Rican art, but also highlighting a new generation of Afro-descendant artists with 24 solo exhibitions and six major group exhibitions in other cultural spaces and museums across the country.

We also took on the task of developing other collections, such as combs, stamps, prints, and postcards, related to Afro themes, which we will be exhibiting in the coming years. With tireless work over the past four years, the evolution of the cultural space into a museum was inevitable,” said founder, director, and curator Edwin Velázquez Collazo

For the opening of the museum on Saturday, October 11, 2025, the exhibitions “Colonial Brazil” will be presented in the Isidro Room, which brings together a selection of 16 old engravings from the 19th century that illustrate the life, customs and punishments of slaves in Brazil at that time, and in the Conrado Room, the collective exhibition “Black Memory: portraits and self-portraits / MACAS Collection” will be presented with works by Afro-Puerto Rican artists: Isadis J. Alcántara Rivera, Gabriela M. Vázquez, Violeta Vani, Jehiel Franco Torres, Elías Carmona Rivera, Joyce De Jesús Martínez, Eduardo Texidor and Maribel Canales Rosario.

Finally, Velázquez points out: “Becoming the Museo Afro Casa Silvana (MACAS) allows us the possibility of connecting with history, sometimes forgotten, and continuing with our principles and commitment to being an inclusive, decolonial cultural project of resistance and decentralization of art.”

For more information and schedules write to the email ecv.macas@gmail.com or visit the museum's website at:https://www.museoafrocasasilvana.com/