Exhibitions: September 2009 Archives

I can't remember when I first visited Museum of Chinese in the Americas in its old location, the second floor of the big red school building at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry. One of our Writing New York TAs, a former museum employee, had offered to take members of our class on a walking tour of the neighborhood -- or was it an earlier class on The Port of New York the first time she led that tour? I can't remember. Either way, we met at the museum for a pre-walk discussion, as we have the several times I've taken that walk since then. "Walking tours are a dangerous epistemological activity," she told us as we headed out toward Columbus Park, by which she meant that as a Chinese American woman from suburban Atlanta, was she an "us" or a "them" when she talked about the neighborhood and Chinese immigration more generally?

The collection at the old space was quaint in some ways -- made up mostly of materials that had been scavenged by the museum's founders (a couple grad students, including our NYU colleague Jack Tchen) as an older generation of Chinatown residents passed away and their kids threw away unwanted old belongings: suitcases, clothing, bottles, letters, laundry signs. Curators had used this cultural detritus to create a compelling account of the issues faced by new arrivals to New York's Chinatown over several decades.

The walking tour is hands down my favorite in lower Manhattan: I continue to be blown away every time I walk through the old secret tunnel running from Doyers Street to the Bowery: once a getaway route for gangs and bootleggers (see Freeland, ch. 2), now a subterranean arcade/strip mall of herbal medicine vendors, temporary employment agencies, and English lessons. As such it continues to teach about the history of immigration to this neighborhood.

So it was with some sadness that I realized, last spring, that my class's Chinatown walks would no longer include a stop by that DIY museum space on Mulberry. But my disappointment was more than compensated for by the awe-inspiring Maya Lin-designed space on Centre street, slated to open officially this Tuesday, the 22nd.

The museum's scope and capabilities -- not to mention funding -- have expanded dramatically and the new space will host exhibitions that range far beyond the history of New York's Chinatown. The two inaugural shows suggest the range of what MoCA will now be able to offer visitors: The new core exhibit, With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America, will focus broadly on the history and experience of Chinese immigration to the Americas. From the museum's site:

The core exhibition presents the diverse layers of the Chinese American experience while examining America's journey as a nation of immigrants--from an historical overview of Chinese immigration to the United States, to the individual stories that reveal what it has meant to be Chinese in America at different moments in time, to the physical traces and images left behind by past generations for us to consider, reflect and reclaim.

A key element of the exhibition is its dialogue with Maya Lin's architectural centerpiece - a sky lit courtyard at the heart of the museum. The exhibit wraps around and engages with the courtyard, which represents the idea of China - a collective origin, which for many after the first generation, becomes a constructed, rather than an actual, memory. Not unlike the rooms of a Chinese house, each section of the exhibit is connected to the courtyard via portals. Each one containing films of people narrating personal life stories, demonstrating how history is propelled by individual moments of decision-making in the face of circumstances larger than themselves. External walls dialogue with the inner, in order to provide the larger historical context for Chinese American struggles and achievements.

The second major exhibit opening Tuesday, Here & Now, focuses on contemporary Chinese American artists in New York:

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a series of panel discussions, artist workshops, and a full-color, illustrated catalogue that features interviews with artists Xu Bing and Wenda Gu. The exhibition is organized into three seven-week long chapters--Visual Memories, Crossing Boundaries, and Towards Transculturalism.

The first chapter, opening September 22 and running until November 2, features the following artists:

• Xu Bing (b. China, 1955; U.S. arrival, Wisconsin, 1990)
• Yun-Fei Ji (b. China, 1963; U.S. arrival, Arkansas, 1989)
• Lin Yan (b. China; U.S. arrival, New York, 1986)
• Cui Fei (b. China: U.S. arrival, Pennsylvania, 1996)

The subsequent chapters of the exhibition will be mounted on November 19, 2009 and on January 10, 2010.

In other words, repeat visits will reward you. And you can still book the walking tour I love so much. Take note: The first five days will feature free admission:

Tuesday, September 22: 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm (last entry at 3:30 pm)
Wednesday, September 23: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Thursday, September 24: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Friday, September 25: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Saturday, September 26: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)

Given that the museum is just down the street from where I live, I'm digging the ways in which it's evolving into a vibrant artistic and intellectual center that will impact multiple neighborhoods.

Oh, and p.s.: If you missed City Room's three-part Q&A series on Chinatown gentrification (with Hunter College professor Peter Kwong), it might make good reading before you head down to the museum sometime this week.

Cyrus and I spent the entire day today with a group of really interesting folks -- several of whom had written books I own and sometimes teach -- powwowing with the directors of the South Street Seaport Museum about their institution and its possible future directions.

No word on that project now: this was a very preliminary conversation about changes that will be years in the making if enacted. But I left feeling hopeful about a museum I'm very fond of -- especially the buildings it inhabits and the boats it owns -- and having had a nice day talking to smart people who care about a lot of the same stuff I do.

But here's the part I really wanted to crow about: I need to go back, because we really only had a couple minutes to run through it, but the big new exhibition they've just installed for the Henry Hudson 400 looked absolutely fantastic. Co-sponsored by the Dutch National Archives, the show, "New Amsterdam: Island at the Center of the World" has all sorts of treasures on loan, some of which will be familiar to people who've read even a small amount of illustrated New York history. One of the big draws, certainly, will be what some have called New York's "birth certificate," also known as the "Schaghenbrief" or Schaghen letter. It's the letter home to Holland that notes the purchase of the island of Manhattan for the equivalent of 24 dollars. A steal of a real estate deal or colonialist exploitation? You decide.

The show is named, obviously, for Russell Shorto's deservedly popular history of New Amsterdam, which works well in the undergraduate classroom and is a lot of fun to read, in part for its relentlessly and self-consciously anachronistic narration: references to New Amsterdam's "bar scene" for example, or -- my favorite -- to Peter Stuyvesant's Giuliani-like "quality of life initiatives." We were fortunate to have Shorto himself walking us through and pointing out highlights.

So many other pretty pieces of paper. Like this one, a view of "Amboina," or Ambon Island, the HQ for the Dutch East India Company in the 1610s:



I was also smitten with the original of the Castello Plan -- a map made just before the turn-over to the English in 1664 -- on loan from the Italian House of Medici. Shorto pointed out that it would have been colored, originally, like the image above, had the Medicis not left it exposed to sunlight.

All afternoon I've been contemplating the prospect of a New Amsterdam tattoo ...