A two-week institute for twenty-five school teachers on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its legacy.

On June 18th, 2012 Congress passed a resolution expressing “regret” for its 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first such statement in the 130 years since the Act’s passing. Such Congressional action prompted three humanities projects that address Chinese Exclusion and its legacy: a major NEH-supported traveling exhibition of the New-York Historical Society on view from September 2014 – April 2015, the NEH-supported historical documentary by Ric Burns that will air nationally in fall 2015, and the proposed NEH Summer Institute for Teachers at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) scheduled for July 10-23, 2016. The Summer Institute will enable 25 K-12 teachers to learn from leading scholars and work with primary materials and artifacts. Participants will also develop pedagogical approaches for integrating these unique objects and original documents into their local school curricula and explore new perspectives on the history of immigration, citizenship, and what it means to be American.

To support the extensive, year-long evaluation and reinstallation of an exhibition on the history of New York Chinatown at the Chinatown History Museum.

To support planning for public programming and a permanent community historical agency designed to help Chinese and non-Chinese Americans learn about the rich and intricate history of New York's Chinatown.

GY-10047: To trace the changes that have taken place over the past 100 years in a Detroit neighborhood. Ethnic groups studied include Greek Orthodox and Hungarian.

On the 23th of January 2020, MOCA’s archives experienced a devastating fire at its 70 Mulberry Street location. The archival collection, 85,000 items acquired over 40 years, is the largest repository of Chinese American artifacts in the country and embodies the rich history of an immigrant population salient to the narrative of the United States. Most of the collection is feared to have been damaged or destroyed by smoke and water.  MOCA has now retrieved 80,000 items. Our immediate needs are immense. Drying out the items rescued is first priority to prevent permanent water and mold damage.  A Chairman’s grant of $30,000 would go a long way in the first phase of MOCA's fire recovery process.

Hiring of an object conservator and the purchase of preservation supplies to support the rehousing of 175 paper sculptures created by passengers of the Golden Venture ship during their detention by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1993 and 1997. Using recycled and found materials, the sculptures range in size from a few inches to a 4-foot-long replica of the Golden Venture. The conservation consultant will create detailed condition reports for each object and train museum staff to construct custom archival boxes and supports for each sculpture.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) requests $6,000 to commission Lauren Paige Isaacs, an objects conservation specialist, to evaluate and rehouse the museum’s collection of 175 paper sculptures. This project would be a follow-up to the recommendations made by Tara D. Kennedy in her 2012 Conservation Assessment. The sculptures belong to MOCA’s Fly to Freedom collection, which explores the circumstances and hardships faced by a group of undocumented Chinese immigrants that were detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Services after their ship ran aground at Rockaway Beach in Queens, NY in 1993. In 2018 - 25 years after the refugees’ arrival - the museum plans to display these sculptures in a show that will examine the current state of immigration in America. It is imperative that we are able to properly house these pieces to retard their deterioration as well as evaluate them for any damage they may have sustained while being housed in inadequate containers.

The purchase of vertical storage units with hangers, padding, and cloth rods, along with hands-on training, for the rehousing of four collections of textiles, including 117 opera costumes and 330 QiPaos (traditional Chinese dresses), from the Museum of Chinese in America, formerly the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MOCA). These textiles were damaged in a January 2020 fire and previously had been housed in textile boxes that were overfilled due to space constraints. After the fire they were sent to two professional documentary recovery firms for immediate treatment and then returned to MOCA. A December 2020 Mellon-funded assessment determined that the next steps for conservation work would be to fully stabilize and rehouse the collection. With NEH funding, A. M. Art Conservation LLC would conduct a workshop for MOCA staff and interns, and students from the Fashion Institute of Technology, to identify materials and methods for rehousing the collection, followed by an implementation phase in which staff and interns would professionally unpack and rehouse the textiles in more secure and accessible storage.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) seeks funding from the NEH to professionally rehouse 117 opera costumes and 330 QiPaos (traditional Chinese dresses) that have been water damaged following a 5-alarm fire that tore through MOCA’s Collections and Research Center in January 2020. Since this catastrophic event, these valuable textiles have been confined to small non-archival boxes where they are suffering from fabric creases and abrasion. MOCA’s staff and interns will be trained and advised by professional conservators to unpack the materials from the textile boxes and to rehouse them. MOCA will also purchase vertical storage units with hangers, padding, and cloth rods where these textiles could be properly rehoused. This work is essential to ensure that these textiles embodying the transnational and intergenerational histories of the Chinese in America maintain their quality for years to come.

The development of an environmental monitoring program, including the purchase of dataloggers, for the Collections and Research Center of the Museum of Chinese in America. The bulk of the collections is from the 20th century and documents the history of Chinese culture in the United States through photographs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals. The oral history collection includes 320 recordings that document voices from diverse perspectives including the lives of garment, restaurant, and laundry workers; nightclub performers; and community residents. Topics covered in these oral histories include the Chinese-American experience and neighborhood gentrification; interviews from the 9/11 Chinatown Documentation Project treat the lasting impacts of the attacks on the Chinatown neighborhood. The museum's collections have provided sources for numerous scholarly publications on Chinese-American history and the wider Chinese diaspora and also support permanent exhibitions open to the public.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) respectfully requests a grant of $6,000 to establish an environmental monitoring program consisting of 10 dataloggers and appropriate monitoring software in the Museum's Collections and Research Center located at 70 Mulberry Street in New York City. An environmental monitoring program is part of a broader long-term effort to preserve the collections that document the history and culture of Chinese America. Most collections date from the early- and mid-20th century to the present day, and include 2,800 square feet of photographs, artifacts, and memorabilia, 2,000 oral histories, 2,000 books and 6,000 newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and scholarly journals from MOCA's library that were published between 1900 and 1980. The project will allow MOCA to control climate conditions in collections storage areas, assist a separate effort to restore its HVAC system to an optimal level, and assess the collections' sustainability in their current location.

A day-long digitization event to document the personal and family histories of the  Chinese American community, focusing on records and ephemera from family and professional associations, churches, and Chinese schools.  Preservation workshops for the public would be featured at the digitization event, as well as periodically throughout the year on such topics as photograph preservation, textile and object preservation, and training in how to record and save family stories.  Museum staff would also host a subsequent open house with tours of the archives and a “Letters Alive!” program, which would feature readings (in Mandarin and English) of historical letters from the archives written to Chinese American immigrants by their loved ones in China.  With donor permission, digitized materials would be made available for research at the museum’s archives and on the website.  The project would build upon an earlier Common Heritage award by expanding the museum’s outreach efforts in New York City, home to the largest Chinese population of any city outside of Asia.

The Museum of Chinese in America seeks a $12,000 grant from NEH to support Our Family Treasures. This program series aims to preserve, digitize and showcase Chinese-American family and community history and culture. The series consists of: one day-long Our Family Treasures preservation & digital archiving program; four to five how-to workshops led by professional archivists on preserving heritage materials; and monthly one-on-one digitization and consultation sessions with the Museum’s Collections staff. Working on the premise that American history and experience is shaped by the material culture and memories of those who interact intimately with them over time, Our Family Treasures spotlights the untold stories and living histories of immigrant communities in New York City and their heirlooms—objects, photos, paper documents, business and association paraphernalia, and other ephemera of familial and cultural importance—a goal that has been central to MOCA's mission since our founding.