Smithsonian’s National Museum Of Asian Art Celebrating 100th Anniversary With Major Outdoor Festival In May

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. commemorates its centenary in 2023 with a year’s long celebration highlighted by its inaugural Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Festival May 1 through May 14. The event marks the museum’s first large-scale festival and coincides with Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Headlining the event on May 13^th will be performances by international music sensations, Korean American Eric Nam, one of the top K-pop stars with 4.4 million Instagram followers, and Indian American Raveena. Both singers will perform live inside the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the museum’s stage with a broadcast going to an expected crowd of thousands on the National Mall and Freer Plaza.

The performances will be free to the public, but tickets are required to enter the Arts and Industries Building. Further details on the concert tickets will be released via social media in the coming days; follow @NatAsianArt for updates.

“It’s part of the museum’s effort to become more welcoming, to become even more accessible, to reach audiences that wouldn’t necessarily come inside an Asian art museum,” Museum Director Chase F. Robinson told Forbes.com of the institution’s motivation for launching the festival in its 100^th year.

Founded with a gift from Charles Lang Freer of some 9,500 works of art in 1906, the Freer Gallery of Art opened its doors to the public in 1923 as the United States’ first national museum of art. Over that time, the museum has built one of the world’s most important collections of Asian art.

Freer was a self-made millionaire generating his fortune through the production of railroad cars in the late 19^th century. He left school at age 14 when his mother died and taught himself the skills required to succeed as both an industrialist and revolutionary art collector.

“He had this unitary vision which, what at the time was held to be substandard artistic traditions from Asia–although this is hard to appreciate now, in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s (Asian art) was seen as antiquarianism, as ethnography, as marginal to the to the Old Masters in that canonical tradition of art history–he had absolutely no patience for that narrative,” Robinson explained of Freer’s connoisseurship. “He felt as if, at their very best, great Western and great Asian art were conjoined by a unitary aesthetic, a unitary tone and color, and if you come to the museum and spend some time in Peacock Room, and then the adjacent American galleries, you see exactly what he was after.”

The National Museum of Asian Art doesn’t only display Asian art. Freer was James McNeill Whistler’s greatest patron resulting in the museum possessing the world’s largest collection of Whistler artworks, over 1,000. Among them is the fantastical Peacock Room.

Originally the dining room of a London mansion redecorated by Whistler in 1876 and 1877, Freer purchased the room in 1904, had it disassembled and shipped to his home in Detroit, over time filling its shelves with ceramics collected from Syria, Iran, Japan, China and Korea. The interior has been a highlight of the museum since its opening.

“(Freer) was a man who was, in our American collections, deeply embedded in that moment in place in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s,” Robinson said. “But also, he was ahead of his time and in refusing to privilege Western and American art and seeing in Asian art the kinds of creativity and genius that produce the greatest art wherever it may be produced.”

Journeys

Overarching the museum’s varied centenary celebrations and programs is the theme of “Journeys.” During preparation for the anniversary, this word took on a literal significance, COVID-19 preventing the traveling and journeying most people love partaking in, but a metaphorical meaning for the institution as well.

“We were reflecting upon our first century and our plans for the second century and we began to conceptualize the museum’s history as one of a journey itself, one which begins at a certain moment in American history with Teddy Roosevelt and America taking an internationalist position visa vie the world for the first time in the first decade of the of the 20th century–a world which at that moment was being increasingly ordered on American terms; it was the beginning of what we now call the American Century,” Robinson said. “So, a journey in our century from that moment of our founding to the one in which we find ourselves now, which is a much more polycentric world in which Asia, in many respects, is exercising degrees of political, military and cultural influence. It’s a journey not just for us as individuals, but for us as a museum and, indeed, even for us as a nation.”

The journey has been fraught.

The museum was established when the Chinese Exclusion Act restricting immigration to America from China was in place. For the first time, federal law forbid entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.

Subsequent exclusion acts extended the original and for more than 60 years, from 1882 until 1943, Chinese were barred from immigrating to the U.S. Even after its repeal, immigration from China to the U.S. was severely limited. No such measures in American history were ever undertaken with immigrants from Western Europe.

In recent years, expressions of hatred and violence in America toward Asian Americans has surged yet again. Perhaps not surprisingly with a dramatic reemergence of white nationalism and white supremacy around the U.S. and Donald Trump’s insistence as president in referring to COVID as the “China virus.”

The museum takes seriously its role in efforts to curtail that ugliness.

“We’re very much keyed into the necessity of fostering respect, of fostering empathy, of bringing visitors into context and into contact with both the individual and the collective genius that is Asian art,” Robinson said. “What we find is that those who enter our galleries, or those who attend events that celebrate the extraordinary diversity of Asia and Asian American cultures, they can’t, but come away with a better sense of respect and empathy and engagement. The museum takes its responsibility so seriously and is so mindful of that national obligation, and in that sense, we’re not just an art museum, we’re a kind of factory or experiment of respect making and empathy making.”

Asian Pacific American Heritage Festival

In addition to the headline musical performances, programming highlights of the festival include the Washington premiere of acclaimed composer Huang Ruo’s oratorio “Angel Island” inspired by immigrant poetry written on the walls of the Angel Island detention center in San Francisco.

A variety of film, music and dance events are planned.

Cooking classes and demonstrations can be enjoyed, along with pop-up lunch offerings weekdays on the Freer Plaza from local Asian Pacific American-owned food restaurants.

Curator-led tours of exhibitions will be held daily throughout the festival at 11:00am and special centennial docent-led tours at 1:00pm.

Myriad lectures and talks are scheduled.

On May 5^th, a one day arts market on the Freer Plaza featuring local Asian Pacific American makers and artists curated by local art collective SAMASAMA will be held from 3PM–7PM.

On the 13^th, a one-day market featuring food vendors, artists, makers and other small businesses paying homage to the foods and cultures of the Asian diaspora will be in operation.

For a complete listing of each Festival day’s events with times and location, click here.

Also debuting at the museum is a new introductory hall which will feature a rotating display of artworks.

“We’ve never dedicated gallery space to the opportunity of introducing Asian arts and cultures to visitors who are making their first visit to the museum,” Robinson explains. “Our museum has an extraordinary history, extraordinary collection, wonderful expertise, and for decades and decades, we’ve had a devoted following, but this is again reflective of the journey the museum has taken. It’s an attempt to speak permanently and powerfully to those for whom Asian art and culture may be less familiar, for those who come to Asian art and culture less with a kind of expertise and more a kind of curiosity.”

The gallery also incorporates contemporary voices in ways that foster understanding of the multi-layered histories of objects and their relevance to the world today.

“The space aims to use a small number of very evocative, very multi-layered pieces to introduce viewers to the geography, to the culture, and to the visual traditions of Asia,” Robinson adds.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art is free and open to the public every day except December 25.