Wing Luke Asian Museum: A Place for Voices Not Otherwise Listened To

The Administration of Cultural Democracy:
Intro | Maine | Minnesota | Washington

Wing Luke Asian Museum building in Seattle's International District. View slideshow of additional images. Photo by Tom Borrup

Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum has become widely recognized within the museum field, as well as among community-based cultural organizations, for its exhibition development and community-engagement process. It came to this standing not by design and not without its detractors. However, its consistency as an engaged citizen and leader is repeating great recognition and rewards.

Rooted in the people and cultures of its geographic community, and like the Center for Cultural Exchange and Intermedia Arts, Wing Luke remains committed to building connections with and between its neighbors and with others in the broader community. Some would consider Wing Luke's constituency homogeneous. However, as a pan-Asian Museum, it encounters plenty of ethnic and cultural differences, as well as the generational, class, gender and other differences and injustices that affect any community.

Established in 1967, as a tribute to Seattle's first Asian-American City Council Member, Wing Luke, the museum was born of a sense of pride and participation in the city's civic life. Before Luke died in a plane crash in the prime of his career, he had spoken passionately about the creation of a museum to serve the community.

It began as a true community effort, run by volunteers and located in a storefront in Seattle's International District, an area sometimes referred to as Chinatown, a magnet for immigrants from the East and made up of many Asian ethnicities.

The museum's inaugural exhibition included photographs, news clippings and personal items commemorating the city's pioneer Chinese families. After a few years it was able to hire staff who had only the resources of the immediate community and who continued to assemble exhibitions from what could be collected and borrowed from residents. These included items depicting both the history and the artistic expressions of the community, many of which accrued to the Museum's permanent collection. As a professional staff emerged, they approached the work from a more traditional Western museum model, collecting, organizing exhibits and conducting tours and educational programs.

New Leadership and a New Approach

Ron Chew was hired as director in 1991. "When I came to the Museum, I hardly knew what a docent or curator was, or how a real museum was supposed to operate," he says. In many ways this was probably key among his many strengths.

"There have been three directors in 30-plus years," Chew recounted. "The previous two were white and from outside the community. Their focus was on educating the general public." Chew shifted the focus to community empowerment. Like Bau Graves in Portland and myself at Intermedia Arts, Chew found himself inventing ways of working based on his prior experience and personal values.

His career up to that point had been in journalism and community organizing. For ten years he was editor of the International Examiner, a community newspaper serving Seattle's International District. Like most community or ethnic papers, it serves to bring to light stories of the community, provide information useful to its members and advocate for the community's cultural, economic and political position in the context of the broader community. Chew's orientation as an organizer and skills as an advocate-journalist are what he brought to the Museum. They proved an excellent fit.

Chew immediately brought on board a new education director, Charlene Mano, who shared his activist vision. They soon launched an ambitious new exhibition project called "Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After." It opened a half century after the U.S. government forcibly removed 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and placed them in remote camps for the duration of World War II.

The exhibition was an enormous success on many levels. It drew unprecedented numbers to the converted 7,200-square-foot former auto garage. Over 50,000 people visited this heretofore quiet neighborhood cultural center. And while it affected a wide number of people, the power of the storytelling and the presentation came from the fact that Chew and Mano had involved over 100 people in the formation of the exhibit at every step of the way.

"They learned, planned, shared, gathered information, conducted interviews, designed, wrote and built the exhibit," Chew wrote in a 2000 article looking back on his experiences. It would become the model for every exhibit to follow.

"It gave sanction, in a museum setting, to the notion of students, non-professionals and elders as scholars and lead decision-makers, rather than token advisors." Chew goes on. "Museum professionals would do well to remind themselves that what they do is neither so arcane nor so sacrosanct that ordinary people can't be meaningful participants."

The museum is located in a colorfully painted and adorned building in the heart of the International District. After raising $350,000, the museum renovated the upper floor of the garage (street level) in 1987, with the lower level converted by the Northwest Asian American Theatre to a modest theater space. Both organizations continue to share the building.

Jammed into this 7,200-square-foot space, Wing Luke's compact permanent and temporary exhibits leave little room for the frequent busloads of school children and other visitors. Staff work in cramped quarters and storage space for the museum's expanding collections would make most museum professionals gasp.

Community Assets and Community Stories

Chew and Mano focused on the assets of the community, not its deficiencies. "It takes time to gain their trust and build their participation, so we try to maintain an overall spirit of equal collaboration with groups bringing whatever resources they can best offer," writes Mano in a Wing Luke brochure.

Chew's premise that a museum can and should be a "living laboratory for the collaborative talents of ordinary people," is fundamental to his belief in putting cultural democracy to work building community and revitalizing this urban neighborhood. Healing divisions within the Asian-American community – some with thousand-year-old roots in Asia – and bridging differences over contemporary local issues is one of the Museum's key functions and important contributions.

Although there were many nay-sayers in the Asian-American community and in the professional art world, Chew persisted, developing a community-based process that is painstakingly followed in the development of Wing Luke's exhibitions. The early success with the Order 9066 exhibition gave credence to the method and confidence to Chew and his staff.

Contrary to his approach, "Museum culture is about bringing someone in from outside to legitimize," said Chew. His foremost concern is building relationships – roots in the community. Most institutions use an anonymous voice of authority, he continues, "there's a sense that general audiences might be turned off by first-person voice."

"It's very powerful to have people tell their own story," he says, and the museum, like the ethnic press, is what he calls a "vehicle for voices not otherwise listened to."

In a 1997 Seattle Times interview Chew said, "In most museums the community is on an advisory board; we see the museum as an advisory board to the community. We see ourselves very much in the middle of the fray, championing issues and using history to correct injustices."

A Growing Community Confronting Change

The International District stretches from a recently restored Amtrak terminal on the west, close to industrial areas by the Bay, with the historic Pioneer Square area to the north. Known alternately as Chinatown, it gradually moves uphill to the east to Interstate 5 where it is cut off from other Seattle neighborhoods. Construction of the Interstate, as in many communities of color across the U.S., cut through a Chinatown that was once much larger.

The district is an eclectic mix of new construction, including Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's immense landmark glass-and-steel Vulcan Corporation headquarters near the train station, and a mix of historic commercial and mixed-used buildings up the hill toward the east, some active, some vacant. New development near the railroad terminal includes a large mixed-use complex known as Umajimaya Village, which includes a vast Asian grocery store, Asian- and English-language bookstore, restaurants, and apartments above. It's a very walkable neighborhood with broad age diversity and a lively mix of shops, restaurants and light industry.

When the museum was in its infancy in 1970, the Asian/Pacific-American population of Washington State was 53,400. It is currently near 400,000 and by 2010 is expected to climb to 544,000, a 10-fold increase in 30 years. Seattle is the hub of the community and the International District its historic beginnings its the heart.

The museum envisions a major role for itself in the community's future. It's in the midst of a $30-million fundraising campaign to buy, renovate and move into one of a pair of historic hotel and mixed-use buildings, each 60,000 square feet, known as the Kong Yick Building. "In the early 1900s, 170 Chinese immigrants pooled their resources to build this community center. For 100 years, the building has anchored the social and housing needs of Asian Pacific American laborers," explains Wing Luke's recent fund appeal to the Washington State legislature. New immigrants lived, worked and socialized in these buildings, very much the center of community life.

Wing Luke proposes to recreate this center of community, realizing "a world-class, one-of-a-kind cultural and educational facility for Washington State residents and schoolchildren. It will be a destination for tourists from around the world, attracting over 100,000 visitors annually." They plan to complete the ambitious project by 2008.

"The museum has matured and grown in size, as the institution has shifted its resources and focus to community-based projects," writes Chew in 2000. He sees it continuing to be "a cutting-edge cultural institution that leads the nation in effectively linking cultural expression to community responsibility." Maintaining its participatory process at an expanded scale is certainly a challenge before it.

Adhering to Participatory Process

Cassie Chinn, director of exhibitions and collections, has taken on primary responsibility for leading the exhibition-development process, and anticipates exhibition space expanding to four to five times its current size. She believes "the process" can be applied to larger institutions and has been a speaker at regional and national museum conferences advocating Wing Luke's participatory style.

Chinn came to the Museum in 1995 while still a student in art history and became a full-time employee in 1998. According to Chew, she was hired for her community-organizing skills, not her academic training.

Chinn says she picked up on the process that Chew developed by "listening and watching Ron." She's moved the model forward, better defining its steps, describing it as similar to traditional museum processes but with community members actively involved at every opportunity. She said she learned to be flexible and adaptive, depending on the community she's working with, while retaining the values of the process.

Hers is a discipline not unlike a community artist. There is clearly an art, as well as a practiced method, to bring people together, to listen, to interpret and to rearticulate in another form. "We work closely with community members in spurring a broad-based dialogue, then creating a format for accurately and sensitively representing the community's vision," Chinn says.

Unlike Intermedia Arts and Center for Cultural Exchange, Wing Luke's pace of activity focuses on the development of one to two new exhibits each year. While there's still no end to the challenges, this allows more focus on the process of community involvement in the many details of decision-making and assembling of each exhibition.

The process typically takes from nine months to one year, according to Chinn. Topics come from internal (staff) conversations based on community concerns and conversations staff have during their daily interactions in the community. Staff meet and review ideas. "Ron has lots of sway," she says, but adds they have been working to formalize criteria that include such things as community need and fundraising potential.

Chinn can easily recite the steps in the process and the approximate time required for each step. She points out how it parallels the development process in conventional museums, except it extensively involves community volunteers as both decision makers and workers. They conduct oral-history interviews, collect objects, determine strategies and points of view, review presentation design and sometimes write explanatory copy.

She describes the process as very labor intensive. There are' always at least two exhibitions at some stage in the process of development. Over 100 community members are involved each year to prepare one main gallery show every eight months, a pace that has been slowed from two per year.

"When a show opens, it's a success if they walk through and can identify their hand in it," Chinn says. "And they make great docents!"

"The process of working on the exhibits is as important as the final product," Chew was quoted as saying in 1997. "It fosters community and a shared rediscovery of history by those who take part."

During spring 2003, the museum was preparing two new exhibitions. One on sports was nearing installation, and one on Hip Hop was in the planning. Chinn's assistant, whom she described as a "Hip Hopper" was beginning to take a larger role in planning this exhibition, primarily with a younger committee. "The group wanted it to be for people not in Hip Hop. They want to be understood," she said.

Applying "The Process" to a Larger Venue

Partly in preparation for the new, larger building, Chinn has been working on a new exhibition program called New Dialogues that will produce as many as four shows per year, and address issues that are more current. They will be housed in a smaller gallery space and be created with the help of an ongoing committee that can develop these smaller-scale exhibitions in a shorter time frame.

She sees that one of the primary goals of the process is to empower the community. Some people are called on again and again, she says, "and it's good to have some familiar with the process, but we're always trying to build our base."

In maintaining their overall schedule, the museum keeps a balance between art and history. Chinn described an art exhibition to engage and to show the work of Filipino artists. "Twenty-two members of the Filipino community met to decide the theme, develop a call and to appoint a jury of community organizers and a curator," she recalled.

The museum also works hard to maintain relationships with the many ethnic cultures that make up the Asian/Pacific-American community. "The process for planning the new building is deliberately mixing ethnicities in an advisory committee," she said.

The value of Wing Luke's process has been recognized by many, including the U.S. Park Service. Trying to sensitively plan an educational facility at Minidoka, the now-abandoned World War II Japanese internment camp, the Park Service turned to Wing Luke to gather former internees and to facilitate meetings to establish themes and tone for the facility. For Wing Luke it generated some contractual revenue and acknowledged the organization's important capacity for galvanizing the voice of the community. The results will be the story of the internment experience from the point of view of those directly affected.

Meanwhile in the cash-strapped 2003 Washington State legislative session, Wing Luke's capital request to purchase and convert the Kong Yick building surfaced as a high priority for both major political parties and the Governor, landing a $1.5 million allocation. Political leadership in the Asian-American community, unbeknownst to Chew, established the Wing Luke Museum as one of its three top priorities for the session.

"We partner with a lot of social-service agencies in our work. We're not seen as an add-on, but as something the community wants to happen," Chew said, thinly masking his pride.

Like the other two institutions profiled here, Wing Luke has created an institution deeply rooted in their community, one that is looked to as more than just a place to see and experience historic, creative or cultural expression. It's a place where one's voice is reflected and honored, and where often neglected voices become an integral and lasting part of a growing community's living history and culture for the generations to follow.

Return to Introduction: The Administration of Cultural Democracy

Tom Borrup is a community activist, writer and consultant based in Minneapolis. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2003, and now works as a consultant to arts organizations, foundations and public agencies in several cities around the U.S.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2003