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Foreward by Nancy Hom | ||||
| Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) enables artists and community members to probe their cultural histories more deeply and to express their insights to audiences through innovative artistic media. We have had a long history of working with grass-root communities that have struggled to make their stories heard in this country. KSW presented its first exhibit about Angel Island in 1976. Paul Chow, who spoke to us often about the Angel Island Immigration Station, encouraged our artists to visit the barracks. The resulting exhibition sparked a public interest in learning more about the Chinese immigration experience, and led to many other artistic expressions on the topic.
It is most fitting that Kearny Street Workshop is again addressing this issue, this time from the perspective of facing our collective shame and bringing a sense of closure and healing for our community. Nearly sixty years after their detention on Angel Island, some of the former detainees are ready to talk about their experience. Artist Flo Oy Wong’s sensitive interviews have encouraged some of them to reveal their immigration stories, some of which these former detainees have not told their children. We are pleased to be working with Flo Oy Wong, whose energy and drive is pushing this project forward. Her vision as an artist matches KSW’s mission as an organization – to use our talents and resources to honor our histories, so that future generations will have artistic, scholastic and historical documentation of the lives of our ancestors. We hope that this catalog and the exhibition, made in usa: Angel Island Shhh!, will remove some of the stigma of shame that has haunted Chinese immigrants to this day, and offer a healing and unifying collaborative exploration of the often painful episodes of the Asian Pacific American experience. — Nancy Hom, Executive Director |