The Museum of the Americas was created by decree on 19 April 1941, with the stated aim of bringing together publicly owned collections from Spain's former territories and making a place where they could be learned about, admired and studied by researchers and by the general public alike. It is one of Spain's national museums and is attached to the Ministry of Culture.
That founding purpose explains the shape of the collection. It runs across three bodies of material most museums keep apart: pre-Hispanic archaeology, the art of the colonial centuries, and nineteenth and twentieth century ethnography from across the Americas. The permanent exhibition is arranged by theme rather than by culture, and religion has a section of its own within it, which is unusual and is part of why this atlas has reason to look at the museum at all.
The awkwardness of the institution is also its subject. A museum of the Americas assembled in Madrid, out of what Spanish administration and Spanish collectors sent home, is a museum whose holdings and whose own history are the same story told twice, and the arrangement of the galleries cannot avoid saying something about that. The atlas records the museum as a custodian, names what it holds and how the holdings arrived where that is known, and does not treat the fact of custody as an argument either for or against the institution.