Saving Chinese artifacts Delicate work to restore museum objects after major fire
After a ship carrying nearly 300 undocumented Chinese immigrants went aground in New York City in 1993, the passengers were taken to York County Prison in Pennsylvania.
During years of incarceration, they produced paper sculptures of the Statue of Liberty, a bald eagle and caged birds (photos at right)— works that eventually found a home at the Museum of Chinese in America, or MOCA, for short.
Conservators are hoping to apply a phoenix’s touch to the sculptures — and hundreds of other artifacts in the museum’s collection — after a fivealarm fire erupted at MOCA’s Mulberry St. storage site last month.
“They were very delicate,” the museum’s director of exhibits Herb Tam said of the paper sculptures to the Daily
News. “Surviving this kind of fire and the water damage is going to be really tough. The ones that got pulled out last week, many of them suffered pretty severe damage.”
A volunteer team of conservators is working to salvage the museum’s gigantic collection — more than 85,000 documents, film reels, sewing machines, travel trunks and other items documenting the experience of Chinese people in the U.S.
“For museums, having objects to help tell those stories, to help illustrate what the histories are, is really crucial and why we’re working really hard to save every object,” Tam said.
Since the FDNY and NYC Buildings Department determined parts of the historic, city-owned 70 Mulberry St. building could be safely accessed, workers have removed about a third of the collection, using a process formulated by
MOCA staff and city workers.
Many of the items have been transported to the museum’s 215 Centre St. site, where curators have scrambled to find space for the items to dry. Tam said water wreaked more havoc than the blaze itself.
Conservators from the Museum of the City of New York, Center for Jewish History and other institutions have been volunteering for MOCA. The museum’s landlord donated the fourth floor of 215 Centre
St. as a temporary storage space.
Tam said he wasn’t sure when rescuers would get a chance to remove additional articles from still-inaccessible parts of the Mulberry St. building, where the roof caved in. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation, a FDNY spokesman said Tuesday.
MOCA has raised more than $122,000 through a GoFundMe campaign toward
“the extraordinary expense and work to repair, recover and rebuild its Collections and Archives.”
“I didn’t expect such an outpouring of support for us, for this,” said Tam. “It’s been humbling to see that there’s a breadth of support from very diverse communities.”
The city is helping the Chen Dance Center, which was also housed at 70 Mulberry St., find a new home.
“We are overjoyed to see signs that the loss may not be as great as was first feared,” Acting Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kathleen Hughes said in a Jan. 31 statement. “Extraordinary efforts have given us hope that MOCA’s priceless archives might be saved, and that H.T. Chen’s dance programs can continue uninterrupted. There’s more to be done, and we’ll work with these groups every step of the ways toward a full recovery.”