For those who lost partners, children, siblings, parents, and friends to HIV/AIDS in the later years of the twentieth century, the memory of grief, fear, and mystery which pervaded New York at the beginning of the epidemic remains vivid. But for many New Yorkers and others today, this early period from 1981 to 1985 is virtually unknown. The activist movements that changed the nation’s approach to catastrophic disease have overshadowed the panic of this period when a new and fatal enemy to public health was in its earliest stages and no one knew how to combat it.

Since the 1970s Camilo Vergara has been traveling across the United States photographing and thus documenting hand-painted murals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as they appeared on the walls of establishments such as car repair shops, barbershops, and fast food restaurants in city streets and alley ways. The folk art portraits have expressed how the inner-city residents saw the slain civil rights leader—at times a statesman, a hero, a visionary, or a martyr. Vergara also discovered that these images were often based on iconic photographs of Dr. King but that, depending upon the neighborhood where they were created, the portraits could take on the likeness of Latinos, Native Americans, or Asians.

Nueva York (1613 – 1945) explores how New York's long and deep involvement with Spain and Latin America has affected virtually every aspect of the city's development, from commerce, manufacturing and transportation to communications, entertainment and the arts. Bringing together New York's oldest museum (New-York Historical Society) and its leading Latino cultural institution (El Museo del Barrio), Nueva York spans more than three centuries of history: from the founding of New Amsterdam in the 1600s to the present day, as represented by a specially commissioned documentary by award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns.