Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond was an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2024-2025) that highlighted the complex history of Asian Americans living and working in Washington, D.C. from the 1960s to present day. The exhibition was groundbreaking through its hyper-local focus on the surrounding neighborhood of a museum that typically features broad national narratives, and its attention to artists and mediums unconventional to the museum’s exhibitions: the social architect Alfred Liu; the martial arts collective Simba Dojang; the grassroots publication Eastern Wind; and the muralist Cita “CHELOVE” Sadeli.
As a curator, I advocated for the inclusion of cross-racial narratives in the exhibition to demonstrate the interconnectedness of Asian American history with the Black civil rights movement. I played a key role in exhibition design, layout, and installation. I also stewarded the inclusion of Alfred Liu and Cita Sadeli in the exhibition, including the acquisition of objects into the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. During the run of the show, I researched and developed an online companion that expanded on stories from the exhibition, and curated monthly programs that engaged audiences with the exhibition material through multimedia lectures, martial arts demonstrations, film screenings, and musical performances.
The Color Curtain Project is a series of dinner parties and art book presentations that bring individuals of African and Asian diasporic identities together. By breaking bread, learning history, and sharing stories, the project encourages constructive dialogue around political and social justice challenges that entwine global experiences today.
The project takes its name from The Color Curtain (1956), a travelogue by Richard Wright, who authored the American literary classics Native Son and Black Boy. The Color Curtain summarizes Wright’s observations as an African-American reporter covering the Bandung Conference — an epic convening in April 1955 held in Bandung, Indonesia between twenty-nine Asian and African countries eager to establish a coalition denouncing racism, colonialism, and nuclear war. The Color Curtain is not a comprehensive or technical account of what transpired in Bandung; Wright did not delve into the political and bureaucratic dealings between statesmen. Rather, The Color Curtain offers a personal snapshot of his experience witnessing the collision of Afro-Asian identities, and their collective struggle to find political, economic, and social freedom after many decades of colonial rule.
Many people do not know about The Bandung Conference or The Color Curtain, but their themes, achievements, and shortcomings still reverberate today. The Color Curtain Project aims to celebrate and critically reflect on the connections between past and present by offering a contemporary interpretation over dinner and urging guests to think about what has changed, if at all, between the Afro-Asian diasporic relationship since 1955.
The Color Curtain Project is a collaboration between Washington, DC- and New York-based scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs: Tammy Nguyen, Aerica Shimizu Banks, Seda Nak, Erik Bruner-Yang, Desirée Venn Frederic, Lovely Umayam & Adriel Luis.
Ritual Intervention: Sightlines was activated by artist Tina Villadolid at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Kogod Courtyard in 2024, in response to recent revelations that the Smithsonian had secretly collected human remains in the early 1900s to aid in pseudoscientific research proposing white supremacy. Villadolid's series of Ritual Intervention shed light on lesser-known Filipino histories throughout the United States. In this case, she laid focus on the Filipinos whose brain samples were acquired without consent, and which have been part of the Smithsonian's collections for over a century.
The activation, which took place at the opening of the exhibition Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond, expanded the notion of Washington, D.C.'s "local community" by acknowledging those whose bodily remains have been put in storage in the region. Using natural materials of the Philippines, quotes from Secretary Lonnie Bunch's official response to the investigation, and polaroid photos taken at the site of the intervention, Villadolid met the moment of reckoning with an approach to bring people together, honor her ancestors, make space to heal.
Photos by AJ Mitchell
