Team From NYC Museum To Collect Stories, Artifacts In Portland

PORTLAND, OR —A team from New York's Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) will be in Portland Friday to record stories and collect artifacts for its Collections Center.

The team is on a national tour designed to expand the museum's collections after many of its artifacts were damaged in a Jan. 2020 fire.

At 9 a.m. Friday, the team will be at the Portland Chinatown Museum, 127 NW 3rd Ave., where it will hold a community visioning session to capture stories and collect new artifacts. MOCA said it will be looking to collect: paper, textiles, heirlooms, photographs, marriage certificates and newspapers from families, individuals and institutions that will help "expand the Chinese American narrative in America."

MOCA was established in 1984 and has been in its current location, at 215 Centre Street in New York, since 2006. On January 23, 2020, a fire tore through its Mulberry Street space, which housed the museum's collections of more than 85,000 artifacts.

Initial fears that all had been lost gave way to better news that much of it was salvageable.

According to MOCA, though most of its collections were recovered, the damage caused by the fire resulted in 85 percent of the museum's artifacts in need of restoration.

The fire was the impetus for MOCA on the Road, a 10-city U.S. tour in which MOCA representatives will visit cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Atlanta.

"The in-person initiative is designed to inspire individuals to preserve artifacts, share them with the public at-large and provide an educational resource to supplement missing parts of U.S. history," MOCA representatives said in a statement.