This past February, the museum celebrated its first-ever Lunar New Year event. The not-so-secret anxiety of our programming creators (and party planners of the world) is that for all your planning and time, no one will show up. However, I was grateful that we had well over three hundred people attend, and I was especially glad to be able to create and hold space for people to celebrate Lunar New Year—a holiday that, in its essence, centers upon reuniting with loved ones.
To give some behind-the-scenes perspective upon how a program of this size is put together, I will share some key themes that guided the planning of our event. Any museum program’s activities are rooted in a core idea that we want to teach and a unique experience that we want our local audiences to have. Some challenges my collaborators and I faced were how our work could at once acknowledge and challenge the idea of an “authentic cultural experience,” given that we were creating unprecedented cultural heritage programming on behalf of an institution located in rural New Hampshire, coupled with the pressure to create a “catch-all” that everyone could enjoy. We needed to be culturally sensitive yet accessible to all. Questions to which I kept returning included the following: What do we want people to learn from this event and celebration, knowing that we’ll likely have attendees bringing a mix of their own expectations, traditions, and experiences? What is an “authentic” cultural experience when Lunar New Year is already a blend of local and national traditions that are unique to every place and person who observes it?
If, in fact, our goal is not to present a fixed version of what is “traditional” or “authentic” because we understand that those traits are expressed in their multitudes even in their original contexts and nations, then we should instead focus on qualities of this holiday that are universal: a celebration, food, and gathering.
We settled on offering red envelope decorating, snacks and juice, a traditional Korean board game called yutnori, printmaking a dragon banner, special gifted pens for those born in the year of the dragon, coloring pages, and a dedicated pop-up exhibition. My hope was that across these different offerings, we would be able to create a host of experiences for different members of our community, both for people who claim Lunar New Year as their own cultural heritage and for people joining their first Lunar New Year celebration.
One way we did this was to lean on the personal lived experiences of Asian folks instead of generalized historical facts about Lunar New Year. We tapped a mix of Asian and Asian American staff and student interns to curate artworks from the collection that connected to a personal memory on Lunar New Year that they would be interested in sharing.
Object labels, which are typically written at the museum in a specific type of voice and need to go through an extensive review and editorial process before making it onto the gallery walls, were instead written for our program as individual, first-person reflections. Cumulatively, the works chosen represented an interesting blend of mediums and suggested a range of shared experiences: memories tied to food, perspectives on celebrating while living in diaspora, and ways of observing in communion came up in several of these final texts.
This was also the first time in recent memory that one of our program activities was a communal artmaking project. As opposed to an activity where everyone works independently and takes home a separate object, our dragon banner allowed each person to use a gelli printmaking plate to paint a patterned “scale” on its surface. This type of art project felt gratifying in that, at the end of the day, we had one project that showcased everyone’s participation and individual style, and that we had worked collaboratively as a community to create an artwork that will be enjoyed for years to come.
The year of the dragon is often considered especially significant because of the strong cultural associations of the dragon with luck and prosperity: amongst the animals of the zodiac, it is the only “mythical beast.” Thank you to all who supported the planning of a new program like this Lunar New Year celebration, and to the community for showing up: we feel lucky to have seen the outpouring of support and happy smiles at the museum. Join us in celebrating Lunar New Year at the museum again, for the Year of the Snake, on Saturday, February 1, 2025!
This post was authored by: Jayde Xu, Hood Museum Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jayde Xu is the Mutual Learning Fellow for Education and Public Programming. Formally trained as a visual artist, Jayde graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in illustration and humanistic studies. Her studio practice focuses on mixed media and intersections of drawing and language. Most recently Jayde worked in visitor experience at Glenstone museum, with former intern projects at the Young Readers Center in the Library of Congress and the Globe Collection and Press.
Comments