The Brownsville Museum of Fine Art has reopened its doors to the public, after more than two months of being shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With plexiglass in the reception area, employees wearing face masks and hand sanitizer stations available, the museum is kicking off their reopening with Phase 1, limiting the amount of people who can enter to approximately 25 percent, Deyanira Ramirez, executive director at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, said.
“We want to show support to everyone and we hope they stay safe and use face masks. By opening our doors and inviting the community to come visit us, we are not undermining the situation, on the contrary, we want them to feel safe when they visit us and we want them to know that we are very concerned for their health and are taking all the necessary precautions,” she said.
“We are very excited and happy to be able to take this step after almost two months of being closed to the public. We know that the interaction of the museum with the visitors is going to be slow at the beginning, but it’s summer and we hope that once the economy, the business and traveling starts reactivating little by little, we will go hand in hand, it’s all part of a process.”
Along with the Brownsville Community Foundation, the museum decided to extend the time of their SpaceX exhibit so those who were not able to see it have the chance. The exhibit will run until June 19 and the next opening will take place approximately a week after that.
“Little by little, during these months that we had our doors closed to the public, we organized and planned what we were going to do in the museum, for the near future, and how to reschedule our programs during this time that we had to reschedule, and even cancel some of them,” Ramirez said.
“Now, we are reopening on phase one with the necessary precautions and we hope that little by little we will be able to retake our normal activities that we had to stop doing because of the coronavirus,” she said.
Still limiting interactive activities, this year the museum will host their yearly summer camp via online. Ramirez said there will be three sessions of two weeks each. The sessions started June 1 and for students who do not have access to music instruments at home, the museum will lend them the ones available.
“We will be handing out the material needed for the classes the first day of each session, taking all the necessary precautions here at the museum,” she said. “We will also be lending, in an agreement between the student and the museum, the instruments if the children do not have a guitar, a violin or a digital piano.”
For more information about the reopening, visit the “Brownsville Museum of Fine Art” on Facebook.
“We have two exhibits confirmed for July, the artists are excited because they will exhibit, sadly, we are still in phase 1 so we don’t know yet if we will be able to have an opening reception,” Ramirez said.
