17 July 2008
Asian-Pacific Americans Honored in Community-Backed Museum
Expansion of Seattle’s Wing Luke museum financed by community donations
Washington -- For more than 40 years, the Wing Luke Asian Museum, which considers itself the only museum in the United States to focus on the culture, history and art of all Asian-Pacific Americans, was housed in a small, unassuming building -- a former automobile repair garage -- in the Chinatown/International District of Seattle. Thanks to a $23 million fundraising effort by the Seattle community, the museum’s home is now in a restored three-story historic building built in 1910 by Chinese immigrants.
More than 1,500 individuals contributed to the fundraising effort, as did public and private institutions. The new facility is only a short distance from its original site and eight times bigger. It opened its doors in May, welcoming thousands of visitors to two days of opening ceremonies.
With the increased space, says Joann Natalia Aquino, the museum’s public relations and marketing manager, the museum can expand its exhibits and programs. It plans to become a national model for community-based exhibitions and oral history projects.
EMBRACING THE COMMUNITY-BASED EXHIBITION MODEL
A growing number of small museums in the United States are employing the community-based organizational model to carve out a distinctive identity and as a way of dealing with limited budgets and staff. These museums integrate community residents throughout the exhibition process, from design to installation, fundraising, publicity and public education.
“In recent years, many larger institutions, examining their relevance to a rapidly changing world, also have begun to look to smaller museums for examples of how to listen better to community constituents and engage them in the vital work of the institution. This is a happy trend,” says the museum’s former executive director, Ron Chew, in an article in Museum News.
When it opened in 1966, the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM) was run entirely by volunteers. Named for the first Asian-American elected official in the Pacific Northwest region, the museum had a traditional focus on Asian folk arts and crafts.
The emphasis of the museum changed in 1991 when the museum hired Chew, a community activist and journalist, as executive director. Under his direction, the museum began to devote more attention to the experiences of Asians in the United States. According to Cassie Chinn, WLAM's program director, the museum identified the Asian-American community as its "core constituency and number one asset." That community encompasses more than 26 different ethnic groups originally from an area stretching from South Asia to the Pacific Islands.
Asians are the second fastest-growing minority group in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (See “U.S. Minority Population Continues to Grow.”)
Under Chew's leadership, the museum presented exhibitions on challenging topics like Executive Order 9066, which detailed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; Twenty Years After the Fall of Saigon, a look at the Vietnamese who migrated to the United States after the Vietnam War; and The Sikh Community: Over 100 Years in the Pacific Northwest, about the cultural contributions of Sikhs and continued misunderstanding of them by the general public despite the long-term presence of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs in the United States and Canada. (Chew retired in December 2007; the current executive director is Beth Takekawa.)
COMMUNITY HERITAGE CENTER
WLAM -- the first museum in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States to become an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution -- collects and preserves artifacts, photographs, archives and oral and video histories as part of its Community Heritage Center, which was established in 2001 to encourage preservation efforts and increase public access to historical materials. All of the materials are being recorded in a digital database accessible on the Internet.
The museum itself is an artifact. The East Kong Yick Building is one of two historic structures built in 1910 by a consortium of 170 Chinese immigrants. They originally provided apartments above retail spaces as well as hotel rooms for itinerant laborers and newly arrived immigrants. Some of those spaces can be seen in the museum’s guided "historic immersion tours," which transport visitors back to the Seattle of the early 1900s.
Honoring Our Journey, a permanent centerpiece exhibition, addresses five themes in the experiences of Asian Americans: Home, Getting Here, Making a Living, Social Justice and Community.
WLAM also maintains a permanent exhibit with community portrait galleries featuring stories of Vietnamese Americans, Filipino Americans and Indian Americans, and a gallery focusing on Seattle’s Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial.
A permanent exhibit commemorates the life of the man for whom the museum is named. Wing Luke came to the United States as a child in 1930 from China's Guangdong province. Elected to Seattle's City Council in 1962, he was a proponent of legislation against housing discrimination and an advocate of historic preservation. His political career was cut short when he died in a plane crash in 1965.
More information about the Wing Luke Asian Museum is available at the museum's Web site.
See also “Asian Pacific American Heritage Month a Celebration of Diversity” and “Diversity: Offering a Place for Everyone.”
