The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), located in New York City, had been renting its facilities since its inception in 1980. President Nancy Yao led the charge with the board to secure funding to own a permanent home since her appointment in 2015. The plan involved embarking on a $150 million capital campaign that would allow the museum to buy a permanent space, expand its exhibits, and establish an $8 million-$10 million endowment.
The museum had been in conversation with the city of New York since 2016 to receive major capital funding. The organization did not make major progress until October of 2019, when the city awarded it a $40.3 million cumulative grant over five years to purchase the building it had been renting.
The Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB), a local activist group, began to include MOCA as a location in their protests against “artwashing” at major organizations like the Whitney Museum. Artwashing is when large companies with problematic public images (due to acts of gentrification, environmentalism, etc.) sponsor or create a relationship with a cultural venue or arts organization to improve their reputation. These protests caught the museum’s leadership off guard because they did not see a connection between MOCA and artwashing.
CAB began to protest MOCA more heavily after the announcement of its capital funding award. CAB claimed the grant was connected to a community giveback program from Mayor Bill de Blasio to build a jail in Chinatown and other neighborhoods. Yao and MOCA denied being in collaboration with the city for the construction of a jail in Chinatown, and stated MOCA received the grant due to its service to the community and years of formal applications with the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Three months later, in January of 2020, the Mulberry Street building where MOCA’s collection was stored, four blocks away from the museum’s Centre Street building, caught fire and experienced 16 hours of hosing from the fire department. MOCA believed all 85,000 artifacts had been lost to water damage.
In March of 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced the museum to close its exhibits. With the pandemic came a rise in anti-Asian hate, which was amplified by President Donald J. Trump calling COVID-19 “The China Virus.”
Citation: Jacob Santos, "Museum of Chinese in America (2021)", David Geffen School of Drama at Yale Theater Management Knowledge Base Case 21-117, May 15, 2024.