A History Through Tapestry
Every year as spring approaches, the editors who plan Special Sections start thinking about museums and the ways many of them have been refreshing their exhibitions, seeking new audiences and cultivating new artists. For this spring edition of the Museums special section, we’re still covering blockbuster exhibits, like the largest show of Ai Weiwei’s work in the United States at the Seattle Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture’s “Give Me Liberty” exhibition, mounted ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We’re still spotlighting major people and events, like the man who built the Frick Collection and the reopening of the Yale Center for British Art. Yet we also sought to unearth surprising stories of the artists, curators, and community members behind the museums that are just as worthy of sharing, though less well known and often in places less well covered. This year, one such story emerged from Minnesota. One of our contributors, Alex V. Cipolle, wrote a feature about two closely related 50th anniversaries. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Army tanks rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace of Saigon, signaling the end of the Vietnam War. Just two weeks later, on May 14, 1975, Maj. Gen. Vang Pao — who had commanded troops financed by the C.I.A. in the “Secret War,” a Vietnam proxy war in Laos — fled the country for the United States. As the year wore on, many other Hmong people followed in his footsteps, with a large community settling in St. Paul, Minn. And so, Cipolle, who lives in the Twin Cities — an area that is now home to more than 40,000 Hmong and Hmong Americans — knew 2025 would be a big year in her hometown. “I’ve heard many, in the Hmong community and outside of it, wondering what would have happened if they had tried to settle under the current administration, or the current climate in general,” Cipolle said in an email interview. “So I was curious how local museums were marking or reflecting on the milestone.” She knew about the Hmong Cultural Center, an institution in St. Paul, Minn., that features intricate, colorful tapestries, which Hmong people made as a way to preserve family history. As Kao Kalia Yang, a local Hmong author, explained to Cipolle, creating the tapestries “was a rebellious act of us to conserve our stories for future generations using what we had.” As Cipolle started reporting on the feature, her plan was to focus on the history center and its tapestries in the piece. However, as she talked with people in the local community, one name came up again and again: Lee Pao Xiong. Cipolle said that people described Xiong as “really the steward of Hmong and Hmong American history and culture in Minnesota (and the U.S. in general).” That led her to reach out to Xiong, who had founded the Center for Hmong Studies and its research museum, at Concordia University in St. Paul. She had never heard of the center but decided to visit. “It became clear right away that this place and this person are important,” she said later. At the Center for Hmong Studies, she also came across a treasure trove of historical documents — “you could write 1,000 stories about it.” That led her to broaden the feature, no longer focusing simply on the cultural center, but instead working to create a deeper understanding of Hmong culture in the Twin Cities overall. One location she had visited did not end up making it into the final article, however: the cemetery in St. Paul where hundreds of Hmong people are buried. “The Hmong use a specific black granite and style of headstone,” she explained. “It’s pretty powerful to see the community sticking together, even in death.”
Invite your friends.
|
