As Minorities Thrive, So Do Ethnic Museums

Although their experiences as minorities in the United States differ drastically, ethnic communities of Southern California are preserving and celebrating their distinct cultures in a similar way: by building multimillion-dollar museums.

With more than half a dozen projects being planned, expanded or recently opened, the Los Angeles area is leading a national boom in museums dedicated to the arts and histories of ethnic groups. The list includes local efforts by Japanese, Italian, Korean, Latino, Jewish, African and Chinese Americans.

Backers say they want to foster pride within their groups while educating outsiders about such subjects as the beauty of Korean calligraphy, the achievements of blacks in science or the influence of Italians on California agriculture and banking.

“I think each individual community feels the need to have a place to tell their story,” said Suellen Cheng, a Los Angeles city curator aiding plans to create a Museum of Chinese American History.

Fears about losing ethnic identity through assimilation bolster the desire for museums. But more important, organizers say, the establishment of something as permanent, public and expensive as a museum represents a coming of age, evidence of emotional and financial comfort.

“I think as ethnic groups assimilate, they want to share themselves with the rest of Americans,” said state Sen. Charles Calderon (D-Whittier), board chairman of the downtown Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, which after long delays is set to open a first phase Saturday. “I think they want to show what’s good about their culture, what’s not so different from everybody else. It’s a maturation process.”

The trend, said Selma Holo, USC’s director of museum studies, “is almost a cry of Americanness, saying ‘We belong here too. We can make a museum.’ It is something especially in our air in Los Angeles.”

Assimilation vs. Segregation

Ethnic showcases throughout Southern California are at various stages of development, ranging from early and difficult fund-raising to final choices on where to install sculptures.

* The $22-million expansion of the Japanese American National Museum is scheduled to open in January across from its original Little Tokyo home in a former Buddhist temple at 1st Street and Central Avenue. The older building will remain open too for exhibits.

* A few blocks away, an old bank building is being turned into the Latino museum, which opens with a show of Cuban-born painter Paul Sierra.

* Less visible are fund-raising campaigns to renovate dilapidated buildings in the El Pueblo Historic Park for the Chinese museum and an Italian heritage museum.

* Farther west, the 3-year-old Korean American Museum is shopping for a permanent home in Koreatown to replace its current rental location on the second floor of a Wilshire Boulevard office building.

* The African American Firefighter Museum, the first of its kind in the nation, opened four months ago in a once segregated station south of downtown Los Angeles. Preliminary efforts are underway for a local African American history museum in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.

* The Skirball Cultural Center, highlighting Jewish culture, is celebrating its second anniversary at its $65-million Sepulveda Pass campus.

Mainstream museums have never included enough elements about minorities, ethnic leaders complain. Still, the movement for separate ethnic museums poses delicate questions about assimilation versus balkanization, about who should present history.

Ed Able, president of the American Assn. of Museums, said some curators “feel it is more effective to focus more specifically in a very specialized museum and others feel it’s better to integrate into a general museum. I don’t think one is necessarily better than another.”

Potential donors sometimes ask Irene Hirano, executive director of the Japanese American museum, why there should be separate museums. She responds that her target audience includes both Japanese Americans and the general public.

“We always have to ask ourselves how we can make it relevant to anyone who walks in the door, to remind them of their own experiences or teach them something they didn’t know before,” she said.

About half the visitors to the Japanese American museum on 1st Street reportedly are Asian or Asian American. A similar proportion of blacks visit the California African American Museum, a state institution that has occupied its Exposition Park building since 1984. Non-Jews make up about one-third of the guests at the Skirball’s new home, which replaced a basement gallery near USC.

Rather than segregate cultures, the museums can promote ethnic harmony through exchanges of exhibits, stressed Skirball President Uri D. Herscher. The Skirball, the Japanese American and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, which emphasizes Native American culture, recently cooperated on a show about family roots.

Nonetheless, separate ethnic pride--and a competitive zeal to keep up with other groups--seem to be very strong motives behind such museums. “It’s a cultural competition, but it’s not a bad thing,” said Evelyn Figueroa, a project director at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Nostalgia and Hunger for History

Museum supporters also express a hunger for history and feelings of nostalgia for neighborhoods and family ties that have weakened as a result of population shifts to the suburbs.

For example, Italian weddings and civic events enlivened the Italian Hall on Main Street, behind Olvera Street, until around 1931. The two-story brick building, built in 1907, is mainly vacant today, its walls cracked, its kitchen stripped, its stage a dusty mess.

“We want to give the Italian community a sense of its own past,” said Gloria Ricci Lothrop, a Cal State Northridge history professor helping the effort to restore the hall into a museum and social center. Proposed exhibits would include the nets of Italian fishermen and programs of 1920s operas.

Similar searches for history and identity during the civil rights and ethnic studies movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s fueled an earlier wave of museums, primarily in the East.

Blacks and Jews were among the pioneers and are active in current projects. Last year, Detroit’s Museum of African American History moved into a new, $38.4-million home. In New York last fall, the $20-million Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust premiered after debate over the need for another museum about Nazi atrocities.

All ethnic museums, through purchases or donations, seek artifacts and artwork that explain history and capture grass-roots enthusiasm. Some items come from Grandma’s attic, some from the hall of Congress, some from prestigious art collections.

The proposed Chinese American museum is at least several years away from opening in the 108-year-old Garnier Building, a remnant of the original Chinatown near Olvera Street. The museum has in storage rice grinders, 1920s clothing and all the cabinets and contents to reassemble an antique herb store.

“We like to have the artifacts that reflect people’s daily lives,” said Cheng.

The Japanese American museum has received the papers of former U.S. Rep. Norman Mineta and the World War II medals of U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat who has represented Hawaii for 36 years. A current exhibit traces the history of Japanese in Hawaii, complete with clothes and knives of 1920s sugar cane plantation workers.

The terrible losses suffered by Korean-owned businesses during the 1992 riots created a sense that the community needed a museum to explain its culture to the outside world, officials said. Since the galleries opened in 1995, exhibits have included serious looks at immigration and lighthearted meditations on kimchi, the spicy cabbage delicacy.

The Korean American Museum, in the Wiltern Building since last summer, plans to use a $250,000 grant from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency as a down payment to buy its own building in Koreatown later this year, the new executive director, You-Kyong Kim, said. In the future, the museum may seek to build a much larger home.

That will not be easy. Across the country, museum leaders say fund-raising is difficult in immigrant communities that are struggling to start businesses and educate children. Overseas donations can be hard to come by. Political infighting on governing boards also is not uncommon.

Even in well-established minority communities, donations for churches, synagogues, schools and hospitals are the priority. It took the Skirball 15 years to garner the money for its new campus and collection. The California African American Museum recently launched a fund-raising foundation to compensate for cutbacks in state money that now comprises nearly all its operating budget, said executive director Jamesina E. Henderson, who is anticipating difficulties.

“Survival issues come first and art and culture are not perceived as survival issues even though they are,” Henderson said.

Because museums are seen as tools to revitalize neighborhoods, government funds often provide the seed money.

For example, the city of San Francisco is helping the Mexican, Jewish and Chinese museums there move to much larger buildings.

In Los Angeles, the Japanese American museum received a $500,000 educational grant from the state, and the city donated the land near Central Avenue for the two-story expansion, which will include a library, a cafe and a garden. The state and city have provided about $1.3 million for the Latino Museum, a project that Calderon estimates now has nearly half of the $5.5 million it will need to finish all the galleries by next year and office space afterward.

Common Traits to All Groups

Conceived more than a decade ago, the Latino Museum had difficulty finding--and financing--a location before receiving the bank near Main and 1st streets. It had the added complication of trying to represent an uneasy coalition of Latino groups, from New York Puerto Ricans to Salvadorans of Pico-Union to Chicanos of San Diego. One planned show, for example, is to contrast artworks by children from the Peruvian mountains with those by Los Angeles youngsters.

(The separate Latin American Art Museum in Long Beach, which opened in November 1996 in a former skating rink, grew from a private collection of contemporary art. It is now expanding.)

Calderon visited the unfinished Latino Museum the other day, inspecting the facade where a bas-relief sculpture of downtown pedestrians is to be installed. He discussed his hopes for all the new ethnic galleries in California.

“We can use the museum to teach different cultures that individuals are not so different after all, that family love is love, that heroes are heroes, no matter the culture, no matter what color the skin is,” he said.