With the past year filled with stories of anti-Asian sentiment, a New York City museum known as the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) dedicated to telling Chinese American history has a new exhibit that decidedly combats such an idea. This display reopened on July 14th to the general public and has the recent addition of an exhibit curated with submissions detailing Asian American racism.

While faced with misfortunes including a fire in the building and the pandemic, Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum’s president wondered “how were we going to survive, but we kept pivoting.” With their hard work, it culminated in a new exhibit titled “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism”. The exhibition's walls are filled with meaningful history, with a timeline noting the racism that’s been directed at Asians and Asian Americans throughout the generations.

According to the Associated Press, “They touch on the treatment of the earliest Asian immigrant communities, how stereotypes connecting them and disease have a long history, to more recent issues like the treatment of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.”

In addition to the timeline of top government officials using anti-Asian slurs as names for the coronavirus and blaming China for its existence, there’s also a record of the various attacks Asians have faced. For example, the shootings at spa businesses in Georgia in March, where six women of Asian descent were among the eight people killed. The display manages to weave storytelling and history with one another to depict the realities that Asians and Asian Americans have faced.

The centerpiece of the exhibit, however, is Mike Keo’s series of images of Asian Americans sharing their identities with the hashtag, #IAMNOTAVIRUS, amongst other feature including a collection of yellow whistles free for the public to take. These choices are meant to demonstrate the inspiring courage that Asian Americans have displayed during the pandemic.

Nevertheless, controversy has embroiled the opening as many artists pulled their works from the exhibition due to the fact that the MOCA would receive 35 million dollars for its needs from a city plan building a new jail facility in Chinatown. In response, Yao Massbach stated that the museum does not support the ideology of a jail in Chinatown and had already been asking for funds for multiple years previously. At the press event for the new exhibit, protesters had shown up as well to show their displeasure.