AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

Leslie Ito shares not only her personal journey as she leads her cultural organization through a sudden leadership transition, but the lessons learned through this process.

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

In the City of Monterey Park, a sleepy city, east of downtown Los Angeles, the late 1970s and the1980s marked a dramatic demographic shift from predominantly White to Asian American. Who had economic and political power was publicly played out through struggles between the city council and the business sectors. An unlikely locus for political struggle was the Bruggemeyer Memorial Library. In the late-1980s, what many might consider to be a neutral agency that collects, organizes and disseminates information, the public library became the battleground to (re)claim community, access and representation of Asian Americans in Monterey Park. By contextualizing the library as civic space, this paper explores dominant U.S. hegemonic ideologies and political agendas reproduced in cultural institutions, such as libraries.

This resource paper provides an overview of how the small but growing Pacific Islander and Asian American community in Phoenix has sustained, developed, and preserved its culture and art in the absence of a permanent AAPI art or cultural museum. This article gives examples of such alternative formats and includes details on dance, music, and other folk cultural practices. Metropolitan statistical areas with AAPI populations comparable to Phoenix include Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Dallas. Phoenix community groups use small, temporary displays at annual AAPI cultural festivals. One approach is a ?museum on wheels? ? a used tour bus filled with certified reproductions of artifacts on loan from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Native Hawaiians also collaborate with the more numerous Native American organizations that can provide venues for indigenous arts. Universities and state humanities councils are frequent sources of funding for AAPI artists. MSAs with Pacific Islander populations most comparable to Phoenix (in the range of 10,000 to 15,000) are the U.S. Southwestern cities of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Pacific Islanders in these cities might be most likely to employ display formats and strategies similar to those used in Phoenix.

A questionnaire was sent to 93 Asian American Pacific Islander organizations and museums throughout the United States. The questionnaire queried the status of Asian American Pacific Islander sound collections that are housed by Asian American Pacific Islander community-based organizations and museums. The questionnaire asked the Respondents basic questions as well as the types of formats used, storage of sound-related materials, and collections management questions. In conclusion recommendations were made on caring and maintaining an Asian American Pacific Islander sound collection.

Progress in Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) health data had begun by the 1990s, although the gains have been temporal and localized. This resource paper reviews the Hawai’i Health Interview Survey, the California Health Interview Survey, and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) with specific data on AAPIs. We then provide an analysis of the NHIS to illustrate its usefulness and limitations in estimating access to health services of three socioeconomically similar AAPI subgroups– Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans. The results underscore the need to disaggregate AAPI data. In tandem with recent improvements in the NHIS, other states with a large AAPI population should invest in ethnic-specific oversampling and in-language survey efforts similar to what has been done in California.