On April 8, 2006, the Wing Luke Asian Museum held the “closing event” for its exhibition, Sikh Community: Over 100 Years in the Pacific Northwest. The event drew a capacity crowd into the theater below our current museum – too small to have its own public programming space. Sikh and non-Sikh community members had gathered to mark the landmark exhibition, share in the cultural traditions of the Sikh Community, and celebrate the community’s rich past, accomplished present and burgeoning future. As recounted in the June 2006 edition of Aasra: Punjabi English Magazine, “The outcome was huge. Vivian Chan who works at the Wing Luke, said she had never seen such a huge gathering in the auditorium before. They had to put a sign at the door that read: ‘The auditorium is filled to its capacity. No one permitted. Sorry for the inconvenience.’ Too bad if you were late or did not make it. You surely missed one of the best celebrations of the Sikhs… where Sikhs have made a difference.”

The event was the culmination of nearly two years of work by Museum staff and our community partner, The Sikh Coalition, building on a relationship begun 4 ½ years earlier. Museum staff and organizers from The Sikh Coalition – a volunteer organization begun in 2001 to address the misdirected hate and discrimination that the Sikh Community faced in the aftermath of 9/11 – conducted informal outreach for six months to form a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) that would direct the exhibition and its related public programming for the next 14 months. The core CAC team, comprised of 19 individuals, attracted additional community participation through informal and formal outreach, conducting oral histories with 29 individuals and gathering artifacts, photographs and documents from 14 individuals and families. In the end approximately 75 community members had a hand in creating this landmark exhibition.

The Sikh Community exhibition was just the latest embodiment of an ongoing experiment of exhibition making that has been unfolding at the Wing Luke Asian Museum for the past 15 years. In 1991, current Executive Director Ron Chew – a community journalist and activist by background – was hired to lead the Museum then already 25 years old. The Museum started in 1966 as a completely volunteer-operated organization, created and named in honor of Seattle City Councilmember Wing Luke, the first Asian American elected official in the Pacific Northwest. Luke, who tragically died in a plane crash in 1965, was a visionary of our time, advocating for multiculturalism, historic preservation and open housing in the Civil Rights Era. Peg Marshall served as the Museum’s first director, beginning in 1970 and working unpaid for several years until enough museum income was generated to support a minimal salary. In 1983, the Museum hired new director Kit Freudenberg, holding degrees in museology and American history and ushering in an era of “professionalism” for the Museum. In 1991, the hiring of Ron Chew, the Museum’s first Asian Pacific American director, marked a shift in the Museum’s institutional direction from Asian folk arts and crafts to the experience of Asians in the United States.

Led by Ron, the Museum began to place the stories of the Asian Pacific American community at the forefront of its mission. At that time, we were a small institution with few resources. We did not have much experience building exhibitions, but we knew the people intimately tied to the history, having lived it ourselves or having grown up hearing the stories from our parents and grandparents. We identified our community as our core constituency and number one asset. The first exhibition created under Ron’s leadership was Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, chronicling the story of Japanese American citizens and legal resident aliens of Japanese ancestry forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated by the U.S. government in concentration camps during World War II. This landmark exhibition was led by three co-coordinators Harry Fujita, Michelle Kumata and Sally Yamasaki, all from Seattle’s Japanese American community. They mobilized a community advisory committee of nearly 30 individuals, who met for just under a year and contributed personal and family mementos for the exhibition. Local author David Takami wrote exhibition text, graphic designer Jeff Hanada completed exhibition design, and artist and woodworker Bob Shimabukuro constructed the exhibition. Executive Order 9066 met with great success, drawing over 50,000 visitors during its seven-month run and receiving the Award of Institutional Excellence from the Washington Museum Association. This exhibition laid the foundation for future exhibition making at the Wing Luke Asian Museum.