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. It closed in the early 2010s, with a prospective reopening date of 2015.In 2015, the Africa Center hired Michelle D. Gavin, former United States Ambassador to Botswana and an expert on Africa, as its Managing Director. Gavin left in late 2016.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.This museum is often confused with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.HistoryBegun as the Center for African Art, the Museum for African Art's founding director was Susan Mullin Vogel, who had previously worked as Associate Curator in the Department of Primitive Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During her time at the Museum for African Art, 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.
