Brave New World: Hudson Museum Exhibit Explores Immigrants’ Experiences
Contact: Gretchen Faulkner, 581-1409, Pauleena MacDougall, 581-1848, George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — For many foreigners emigrating to the United States, the experience requires facing fears and myths about the best and the worst of American life. Preconceived notions, first impressions and anecdotes from immigrants are the focus of a new dual exhibit opening July 12 at the UMaine Hudson Museum.
Both exhibits include photographs and recordings of immigrants’ stories and experiences after moving to Maine or New York City.
Stories of immigrants and refugees living in Queens, New York are presented through a traveling exhibit by New Yorkers Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, who spent three years collecting information for “Crossing the Blvd: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America,” and a companion CD and 400-page book published by W.W. Norton.
Pauleena MacDougall, associate director of the Maine Folklife Center at UMaine, and students recorded oral histories from immigrants living in the greater Bangor area for a more localized exhibit, “New Mainers? The Complexity of Immigrant Identities.”
It includes first impressions, photographs, traditional clothing and personal objects people brought with them to their new home in the United States and Maine.
The exhibits are free and open July 12, with a reception from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the museum, according to museum director Gretchen Faulkner. It is scheduled to close Nov. 23.
“Crossing the Blvd” focuses on families that arrived after the adoption of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act mandating an end to discriminatory immigration policies favoring white western Europeans. It brings to life the stories and sounds of the struggles of immigrants from around the world who settled in Queens, “a modern-day Ellis Island where cultures overlap in a choreography of chaotic co-existence,” according to Lehrer and Sloan. From a Mexican couple who arrived in the U.S. as undocumented laborers hidden in the trunk of a car to a high school in Queens where kids come from 40 different counties, their exhibit probes the multiple cultural divides facing immigrants in search of a new life.
“Crossing the Blvd” video interviews are accompanied by a musical score and are divided into five “movements.” A few of the nationalities represented in the exhibit include Nigerian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, Afghan, Haitian, Egyptian, Russian, Bhutanese, Filipino, Romanian and people from the Caribbean islands. Some are shopkeepers, some are teachers, some came to the United States to pursue religious freedom. And some are political refugees or children of refugees. The exhibit explores multi-cultural traditions and the perspectives of children living modern American lifestyles juxtaposed against the traditional values of their immigrant parents.
Lehrer and Sloan are co-founders of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization documenting and portraying lives of the uncelebrated. Lehrer is an award-winning writer, designer and photographer. He also is an associate professor of art at the School of Art and Design and SUNY Purchase and a member of the graduate faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ designer and author program. Sloan is an actress, oral historian, audio artist and faculty member at the Gallatin School in New York, where she teaches courses in documentary art, oral history, theater and community projects.
Immigrant stories in the Maine Folklife Center exhibit range from a Pakistani cafe owner in Bangor who was threatened in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and then supported by an unprecedented outpouring of community support to a Hungarian woman who tells her relatives back home that Maine is, indeed, a safe and pleasant place to start a new life.
“We interviewed about 15 people from Russia, Hungary, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Iran, Pakistan, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Argentina and Puerto Rico,” says MacDougall. “I wanted to get a sense of the real underlying diversity in our community that we really don’t know anything about.”
MacDougall and her student assistants recorded immigrants’ views on how they came to be here, what they thought before and after, how they were received, whether they experienced prejudice or discrimination and how they create a new community by finding others of similar ethnic backgrounds.