It’s a long subway ride from Manhattan’s Upper East Side — where some of the world’s most ornate apartment buildings stand amid a gulch of world-class cultural institutions — to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, where the Philip Howard Apartments loom over the patchwork of new commercial real estate that has blanketed the neighborhood in the past decade. This is where the Valentine Museum of Art (VMoA) is located. The 5,000-square-foot museum is the product of three decades of art collecting by one man, Michael Valentine, who lived in the building during his youth. He has devoted his collection, resources, and time to turning a small corner in the co-op’s basement into one of New York’s most intriguing new museums.
An Art Collector’s Dream of a String of Caribbean Museums Starts in Flatbush




