The Africa Center, formerly known as the Museum for African Art and before that as the Center for African Art, is a museum located at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, near the northern end of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile. Founded in 1984, the museum is "dedicated to increasing public understanding and appreciation of African art and culture." The Museum is also well known for its public education programs that help raise awareness of African culture, and also operates a unique store selling authentic handmade African crafts. The Museum has organized nearly 60 critically acclaimed exhibitions and traveled these to almost 140 venues nationally and internationally, including 15 other countries. Forty of these exhibitions are accompanied by scholarly catalogues. History Holland Cotter wrote in 2010 about what is now the Africa Center, "In the 1980s and ’90s it revolutionized the way art, any art, could be exhibited. No one else has fully picked up that challenge since. Maybe the museum itself, under wraps the last few years, can do so again." Early years, as the Center for African Art / Upper East Side / 1984–1993 What is now the Africa Center was opened as the Center for African Art in September 1984 by its founding director, Susan Mullin Vogel, who had previously worked as Associate Curator in the "Department of Primitive Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The center's original location was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in "a pair of converted town houses at 54 East 68th Street." As director, Vogel curated and organized ground-breaking exhibitions which put into question ways in which African art is presented to Western audiences, and how museum practices structure knowledge for the public. The most well-known of these exhibitions are "Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections" in 1988, "Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art" in 1994, and "Africa Explores: 20th-Century African Art" in 1991. Based largely on Vogel's earlier exhibitions, Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 1989 that the 1980s "may also come to be seen as the beginning of the golden age of African art exhibitions." As the Museum / SoHo / 1993–2002 In February 1993, the institution changed its name to the Museum for African Art and moved to a three-times larger space at 593 Broadway in Soho, that was designed by the architect and artist Maya Lin and described