Museum Picketed on Eve of Vietnamese Art Show

About 70 activists in the Vietnamese American community protested Friday outside the Bowers Museum on the eve of a Vietnamese art exhibit opening today in Santa Ana.

Carrying picket signs and flags of the former South Vietnam, the group quietly demonstrated against the contemporary art exhibition they are calling Communist propaganda.

The protest comes a day after museum officials decided to restore a controversial painting to the exhibit, which they had originally planned to hold out of the show because they felt it might offend members of the Vietnamese community.

Bowers Executive Director Peter Keller said he changed his mind after being barraged by more than 100 calls from the public demanding to see the entire exhibit. The controversial piece, titled “Young Woman Forging Steel,” shows the subject of the painting in the uniform of a North Vietnamese soldier.

Vietnamese community leaders are angered over the museum’s last-minute reversal. They say the traveling art exhibition, displayed at museums across the country, portrays Vietnam’s Communist government in a sympathetic light.