Museum Review: Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle

Should you ever visit Seattle (or be lucky enough to live there), please promise me this: you will go see the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Never mind the Space Needle and the original Starbucks coffee shop, THIS is where the city’s incredible history resides.

The Wing Luke is the only museum in the US dedicated to telling the stories of the Asian Pacific American experience, and they tell these stories profoundly, portraying the people’s experiences in the beauty and simplicity these very cultures embody. The permanent exhibit “Honoring Our Journey,” covers all aspects of the Asian Pacific American experience from harrowing journeys to discrimination upon arrival and the strong community bonds that held them together through it all. At its inception in 1967, the museum was strictly dedicated to Asian folk art, but later expanded its mission; the museum now explores both civil rights and social justice issues while continuing to focus on contemporary art.

The Wing Luke is also a recent Smithsonian affiliate, the first in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2008, when the Wing Luke moved into its current home—the East Yong Kick Building—in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, preservation was high on the list of priorities. Much of the wood in the galleries and comprising the main staircase are original from when it was built in 1910. They also preserved the adjoining hotel and grocery store and now offer guided tours.

Should you go to this museum, do your best to schedule enough time to go on this “Hotel Experience” tour (included with the regular $12.95 price of admission). It’s a Pacific Northwest version of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC, refurbished and interpreted just as simply and profoundly as its New York sibling.

There was minimal use of technology, and when it was used, it fit seamlessly into the hotel’s bare-bones rooms. For instance, below is a video taken in the “kitchen” of the hotel where the visitors were able to hear and see what those early 20^th century Asian immigrants might have been cooking. (Look carefully at the end of the 25-second clip to see a chicken foot in the wok.)

If you’re unable to make it to the West Coast anytime soon, you can also check out this 7.5 minute video about the Wing Luke:

Mary Gen Davies loves being Program Associate at the Heritage Philadelphia Program, but she is seriously considering moving to the Pacific Northwest.

VSA Fall Regional Workshops in Philly

The Visitor Studies Association is hosting two workshops in Philadelphia this fall. Their announcement follows:

Are you an informal educator looking to measure the impact of your work? Do you need data to show how your program is making a difference? The Visitor Studies Association (VSA) invites members and non-members to participate in one or two introductory workshops on evaluation and/or developing a logic model. These workshops are part of VSA’s regional workshop series. Sign up for one or both. They will be held at The Franklin Institute on November 16th. Multiple attendees from a single institution receive discounted registration fees. Practitioners as well as evaluators are welcome! For more information, visit the website.

Evaluation 101, November 16, 2009, 9am -12pm
Presenters: Saul Rockman and Jennifer Borland
This workshops offers practitioners as well as evaluators an introduction to the range of issues and approaches to formative and summative evaluation. The workshop is based on the content of an existing, freely-available and accessible website focused on evaluation in informal settings. Participants explore components of evaluation strategies and review labs on the site that are available for post-workshop reference.

Logic Model Workshop, November 16, 2009, 1-4pm
Presenter: Joe E. Heimlich
This workshop introduces techniques useful in facilitating diverse stakeholder groups through the development of a logic model. Using a thought-provoking, practical, and fun format, the workshop leader facilitates participation in a Mock Logic Development Stakeholder Meeting. Interspersed “sidebar discussions” allow reflection on the group process. Workshop content includes introduction of relevant theory, research findings, and lessons learned from experience. Knowledge about facilitating stakeholder groups is enhanced by exploration of concepts like granulation, flow, linking, clustering, forks in the road, identifying audiences, and “hot spots.”

Revisiting 1969, Part Two: The Year of Gay Liberation

1969: The Year of Gay Liberation on view at the New York Public Library between June 1, 2009 – June 30, 2009, Jason Baumann, Curator.

Exhibitions of contemporary history always risk becoming more celebratory than analytical and 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation was no exception. Documenting the year between the messy and misunderstood Stonewall Rebellion and the first New York Gay Pride March in 1970, this small exhibition unabashedly sympathized with its subject matter and screamed – “yeah, we finally fought back!”

And how could it not? Those of us who identify with or care about the struggle for basic civil rights in this culture cannot absorb or discuss this material dispassionately, even if it is now forty years old. The individual and organizational stories chronicled here are dramatic and compelling – drag queens who refused to be passively herded into police vans, scraggly members of the emerging and bold Gay Liberation Front, feminist lesbians proudly naming themselves The Lavender Menace, upending Betty Friedan’s famous disdain.

The objects preserved and presented here, all from the LGBT archives of the NYPL are gritty, scrappy, and fragile. They are mimeographed announcements, grainy photos, staple-pricked fliers, articles torn from magazines and newspapers. But this is potent ephemera, never coolly displayed or distantly interpreted. This is emotional territory, so emotional that many still don’t view it as legitimate history. Why have there been so few projects of LGBT history here in Philly?

Jason Baumann, exhibition curator and Coordinator of LGBT Collections at The New York Public Library claims “The year 1969 marks the first time homosexuals united, demanded, and were willing to fight for full inclusion within American society. As a result of the actions taken during this time gays and lesbians marked a paradigmatic shift not only in the ways that they saw themselves but also in how the world would see them.”

Maybe so. But I would argue that this exhibition is so celebratory that it forgets its context. Stonewall was in many ways a culmination of decades of civil rights work by homosexuals, rather than a catalyst. A rite of passage rather than a birth. On July 4, 1965, a group of gays and lesbians marched in front of Independence Hall at the first national march for homosexual rights (there’s a state historical marker in front of the Hall marking this event – really – go see it). And after World War II, many gay people chose to stay on the West Coast rather than return to their small towns. It was there, in California in the 1950s, that the first large-scale gay rights organizations in the U.S. formed, with hundreds of members (the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis).

This isn’t to deny the importance of documenting the story of Stonewall, or this exhibition and its presentation of these ordinary, extraordinary objects. The celebration is in many ways understandable. Jason Baumann’s appointment as a curator of LGBT collections is in itself a bold act worth celebrating. Pursing a truly inclusive practice of history remains an ongoing, complicated project. Those of us in the public history field know that the presentation of history is contentious, imperfect, fluid, and crucial. That’s why we go to work every day.

Bill Adair is the Director of Heritage Philadelphia Program.

NTHP Grant for African American Historic Places

The National Trust for Historic Preservation's deadline for Partnership-in-Scholarship Grants for African American Historic Places is one month away. This grant (up to $15,000) will provide financial support for African American sites to improve their interpretation.

Visit the NTHP blog for guidelines and applications; deadline is September 30, 2009.

Revisiting 1969, Part One: Woodstock

There are times when I really regret being born a Gen-Xer. Recounting all the incredible events that took place 40 years ago has convinced me that I’m really a hippie at heart who was born a few decades too late.

I may not have had any control over when I was born, but I’m grateful that I can to relive those experiences that I missed (as much as is possible without ingesting illegal substances). I recently decided to take my little hippie heart—clad in my modern-day Birkenstocks (i.e. Chacos) and driving a hybrid car—to the one-year-old museum established at the site of Woodstock.

Part of the fun is actually finding the place: winding around rural New York, through little towns, past expansive farms and grain silos, I came to truly appreciate the hundreds of thousands of people who found the site before the days of Mapquest.

The Museum at Bethel Woods is a museum dedicated to the 1960s in general and Woodstock specifically and is accompanied on the same site by the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts—a performance center where concerts are held regularly, keeping that musical heritage alive. Both are positioned directly on the site where the three-day music festival was held on Max Yasgur’s farm.

The museum’s permanent exhibit begins with a timeline of the 1960s (highlighting both political events from various years as well as songs that were released each year) which set the stage for Woodstock’s birth, 40 years ago this weekend. While I enjoyed progressing through the decade and learning the history of the concert, a few features in particular captured my interested.

Rounding one bend, I found myself face-to-face with a converted school bus with flower power and psychedelic décor all over the outside and bench seats (as expected) inside. Once seated, a short video about how the multitudes were transported to the concert was projected onto the inside of the window shield. I smiled at the 8-tracks stacked at the back of the bus and the copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring next to the driver’s seat; my imagination transported me to what it must have been like to be traveling on the bus en route with hundreds of thousands of others to this unparalleled event.

Following that was the video recreating the concert itself. Not only was it showing actual footage from the concert, but in order to transport the viewer to the concert as much as possible, the set-up around the screen was made to imitate a stage, complete with stage scaffolding, lights, and enormous speakers. When the video described the helicopters transporting the performers from the hotel to the stage (the only option since the roads were all clogged with concert-goers), the sound of a helicopter descending roared and lights, made to look like propellers, spun on the ground in front of us. Rain, which plagued the crowd throughout the weekend, was simulated with thunder booming and lights flashing as the sound of rain “poured down” on us. And for that moment, though comfortably dry, I was transported back to 1969.

If all one gauges a history museum on is how accurately it is able to help a viewer live or re-live an experience, The Bethel Woods Museum would receive high marks from me. I was placed directly in the middle of the 1960s and grew to understand the need for and significance of Woodstock. And, judging on others’ reactions in the recording booth in which people can share their experiences—those who attended Woodstock, those who wanted to attend but couldn’t, and those of us who would have attended had we been around—other viewers were successfully transplanted back 40 years as well.

And this hippie left experiencing her own little high.

Mary Gen Davies is the gardening, protesting, recycling, all-around green-lovin’ Program Associate at HPP.

HPP Announces a New Professional Development Opportunity:

We’re pleased to announce a new professional development program from Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP). The HPP Scholars program will award small grants to support individual practitioners in the development of imaginative interpretive projects. Applications for the first round of awards are due August 31.

Want to know more? Follow this link to our website for application information, and feel free to contact Laura Koloski with any questions you may have (lkoloski@pcah.us).

From the Field: HPP Travels Lincoln’s Commute—From the White House to the Cottage

We were lost. Though signs pointed to a nearby entrance to Lincoln’s Cottage, we drove the perimeter of a cemetery once, and again. I peered at rows of similar tombstones: thin, white, standing close in the grass. This was not a Victorian cemetery of eclectic monuments, not The Woodlands of my West Philadelphia neighborhood, a cemetery I wander to see competing obelisks and ornate crypts of prominent Philadelphians. Our tour group was driving the bounds of a burial ground for military comrades, the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery, adjacent to Lincoln’s Cottage. Our tour guide described a Lincoln who wandered among these tombstones while reciting poetry.

This cemetery detour was actually a most appropriate, though dour, “pre-trip experience” that informed my visit to Lincoln’s Cottage. On the way to an historic site, a traveler often finds clues that illuminate and juxtapose present and past. In a more light-hearted example, the pilgrim seeking Walt Whitman’s Birthplace on Long Island will first pass the bustle of cars entering the Walt Whitman Mall, before arriving at the quiet of the Whitman family farmhouse. These reminders of the past orient and disorient a visitor before a traveller arrives at an historic site.

Our path to Lincoln’s Cottage, beginning in downtown Washington, was similar in direction and even length to the route Lincoln took to arrive at the Cottage in Northwest D.C. In 2009, Washington traffic slows a bus to the speed of a horse. During warm months of 1862 through 1864, Lincoln commuted about four miles to the White House and returned to the Cottage at night. The Cottage provided a respite in which he could work with full concentration, and relax in moments.

Lincoln needed to get away. At that most famous home-office on Pennsylvania Avenue, Lincoln received delegations of visitors and worked in a house of possessions and pomp. Additionally, the Capital was a busy center of war preparations; caravans of artillery and militia passed through the streets. Present too, were the consequences of war: hospitals full of wounded men. This is the Washington of Lincoln and also of Whitman as nurse, who wrote of his tending to soldiers in The Wound-Dresser, “Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals....”

Lincoln’s path to respite at the Cottage was inherently dangerous, and Lincoln preferred to ride alone, leaving in advance of his cavalry. A sniper shot at Lincoln on his path to the White House in August of 1864. After the attack, Lincoln’s Secretary of War implored him to ride with guards. Once at the Cottage, Lincoln did not escape the Civil War. In this retreat, Lincoln wrote much of the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1863. The Cottage is on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home; veterans sometimes joined Lincoln for breakfast.

Lincoln’s Cottage has been restored by the National Trust, who chose to keep furnishings spare and supplement architecture with sound installations and video. The bare wall of the study reveals horizontal marks of light wood where the President’s bookshelves once stood. From these bookshelves, the President pulled Shakespeare, which Lincoln read to Secretary John Hay until “...my heavy eyelids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.”

Lincoln’s nights at the Cottage were also full of uncertainty. “I couldn’t rest and thought I’d take a walk,” said the brooding Lincoln to Lieutenant Ashmun, an officer who saw the President wandering beyond the guarded grounds of the Cottage and encouraged him to return to the house. These anecdotes about Lincoln, revealed by the interpretation at Lincoln’s Cottage, describe a human president at his most restless, diligent, and even relaxed, a range of states that may be familiar to many of us who have faced personal and professional challenges.

Christy Schneider works in museum education and administration in Philadelphia.