Museum highlights Arab-American arte facts
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By Nana Asfour Daily Star 4 April 2004
A countrywide collection of historic Arab American artifacts to be included in the first Arab American National Museum to open in the United States
is currently under way. The search is being conducted by the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), an organization in Dearborn, Michigan, which plans to open the museum next January.
Established in the late l960s, ACCESS has been supplying the Arab-American community in the Detroit Metropolitan area with a number of services, ranging from English-language classes to healthcare to cultural events. It has grown from a mere storefront servicing some 125 people in the late 1960s, to one of the largest human services providers for Arab-Americans in the United States.
Back in 2000, ACCESS decided that it was time to open an Arab American museum, which will showcase the community's history and contribution to life in the US. "We wanted to document our own story and we realized that no one else was going to do it for us," says Anan Ameri, the director of the upcoming museum, adding that "this was before Sept. 11, 2001, so not a response to it."
The state of Michigan is a fitting location for such a museum, since it has the highest concentration of Arab American. According to the Arab American Institute's independent polling, there are about 490,000 Arabs living in the area.
Dearborn itself has been a favorite destination for Arab immigrants for centuries, and about 30 percent of its current population is of Arab descent.
The timing of the opening of the museum is equally appropriate: Interest in Arab culture is at an all-time high and, according to the Census Bureau's surveys, the Arab population in the United States has increased in the past two decades: In 1990, there were 860,000 Arabs residing in the United States; a decade later, the number had reached 1.2 million.
To procure funding for their project, ACCESS applied for grants and held fund raising events. In the end, the organization amassed $12.8 million.
In September 2000, ACCESS bought land on Michigan Avenue, opposite Dearborn city hall, and commissioned Ghafari Associates, a Lebanese-American architecture firm, to build the museum. Ghafari's designs reveal a nondescript, glass-and-stone structure, with a few Arab architectural elements.
The museum will be divided into three floors. The basement will house an auditorium, a small gallery, two classrooms and a storage area for artifacts. At the street level there will be a resource center, a museum shop, a conference room, a courtyard for small receptions and an exhibit about the Arab world. The third floor will showcase the three main exhibits about Arab-Americans: immigration (who came when and why); how they lived - i.e. what they ate, what religions they adhered to, and what jobs they held; and a celebration of those Arab Americans who have made a significant impact on American society such, as Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ralph Nader.
The first scheduled special exhibit will be Redefining Freedom: Arab American Artists in the US, a show about Arab American visual artists, curated by Salwa Mikdadi Nashashibi, author of the book Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World (1997).
Though the museum is meant to document the lives of Arabs in the United States, parts of the exhibit will focus on the Arab world. "You want to tell people where they came from," Ameri says.
The first wave of Arab immigrants began around 1875 and lasted until 1920, when the US began to restrict entry into the country. At the time, most of the arrivals were from Syria and Lebanon and the majority of the immigrants were Christians. They came seeking economic advancement. A downturn in the Lebanese silk market, which was hit with hard times due to competition from Japan, and a disease that hurt Lebanese vineyards constituted the main two factors for the onslaught of Arab immigration.
After 1940, another large number of Arabs entered the United States. This time they came from all over the Arab world and many were Muslims, although to this day the majority of Arab-Americans are Christians. These newcomers were more financially secure than their previous counterparts. While many left their native countries to gain a better education in American universities, others fled to the US to escape war at home - such as the Lebanese and Iraqi immigrants in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
The last count of Arab-Americans by the Census Bureau was in 2000, so there is no data, as of today, to gauge the impact of Sept. 11.
Ameri and her colleagues have designed the museum with not only Arab-American visitors in mind. "Our target is everybody, especially students who want to learn about the culture." ACCESS believes that its long-standing reputation within the community will help it attract people to the museum.
"We were already hosting a lot of cultural events but we didn't have a concentrated space and there was a lot of crowding in our corridors which shows how interested people are in this subject," Ameri says.
Though all other aspects of the museum's planning have been advancing in a timely fashion, the relic-gathering process has been slower than expected. "Part of the difficulty has been to find people who have something to donate," Ameri says.
So far, the museum's organizers have acquired a number of items ranging from old passports which display stamps of Arab Americans entering the country, to the suitcases with which people traveled to America and materials farmers used when homesteading in North Dakota.
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