A tiny museum with weighty offerings opened its doors to the public in Point Loma on Saturday. Seven years after Deborah Szekely founded the New Americans Museum, it finally has a place to call home at the NTC Promenade at Liberty Station.
Intended to be a center to celebrate the contribution that immigrants “” that is, new Americans ” bring to the United States, the 4,000-square-foot museum will include a gallery, a learning center and a story booth where visitors can record their own family’s immigrant history.
“Our mission is to be a catalyst to celebrate America,” said Szekely. “We aim to foster public awareness of the values and strengths that immigration brings to our commonwealth “” their new energy, their values, their hard work.”
While relatively small compared to larger museums in Balboa Park, the location of the New Americans Museum in the blossoming arts and culture district of Liberty Station will allow it to host large groups, exhibitions, conferences and lectures.
“We are lucky to have found a home at the NTC Promenade,” said the museum’s executive director, Gayle Hom, a third generation Chinese-American and daughter of former San Diego councilmember and state Assemblyman Tom Hom.
“In addition to our administrative offices, exhibition gallery, community meeting/educational multipurpose room and intern/volunteer center, we also have access to a state-of -the-art conference center, event center and a beautiful outdoor venue.”
The outdoor space behind the museum is a patchwork of pathways, grass lawns and a large pond surrounded by palm trees.
More than 600 guests, musicians and dancers found plenty of room to mingle there under a beautiful San Diego sunset during a special VIP preview on Friday, June 20.
In its seven-year history, the organization has already hosted two seminars and one conference with over 500 attendees at other locations in San Diego.
The New Americans Museum Gallery will feature immigrant related art.
The opening exhibition includes a Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition, titled “Becoming American: Teenagers & Immigration,” that features the work of photographer Barbara Bernie.
Bernie’s black-and-white photos of teenage immigrants to the United States include short captions with commentary near each subject.
Also currently on exhibit is “A Contemporary Story: Perspectives by Immigrant and Refugee Artists,” a product of the work of a San Diego based non-profit called the AjA Project that runs an after-school program for local refugee youth. This exhibit features artwork and photography by San Diego’s immigrant and refugee children.
The San Diego City Commission for Arts and Culture and the San Diego County Board of Supervisors both provided funding for the current exhibitions.
The gallery, which is open between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesdays to Sundays, does not charge admission.
Hom said that the museum does have some funding at the moment and plans to reach out to local community groups that share their mission to help bring other exhibitions and events to the museum.
Additional shows planned for the rest of 2008 include: “The Alvarado Project: Through My Father’s Eyes,” a photographic exhibit by Filipino-American Ricardo O. Alvarado; and “Between Cultures: Children of Immigrants in America,” another Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition.
Although none of the dates is finalized, Hom expects that the two displays will make their respective debuts before the end of the year.
San Diego community interest also includes a possible collaboration with the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of San Diego.
A proposal to use the museum’s recording studio to document the experience of some of San Diego’s Somalian refugees may come to fruition when the studio is ready later this year.
The facility is located within a soundproof vault used by military personnel when the building was part of the NTC Command Center. The soundproof feature may prove valuable during recordings as aircraft leaving Lindbergh Field roar overhead.
Museum officials said there are many reasons why San Diego seems like a fitting location for the New Americans Museum. There are similarly themed museums planned around the world, and one already exists in New York at Ellis Island.
However, there are few other places in the world where so many immigration issues co-exist in one place.
A mere 20 miles south of the door of the New Americans Museum, located at 2825 Dewey Road, is the San Ysidro border crossing ” the busiest international crossover spot in the world.
Just to the west of the crossing, in Border Field State Park, a series of stark metal girders rises out of surf and across the beach. It is the start of the controversial border fence that stretches eastward from the Pacific Ocean for miles across San Diego’s South County.
At about the same distance from the museum to the east, the casino trade has transformed the look and feel the area’s Native American communities.
Standing at the door of the museum, looking across San Diego Bay, one’s imagination can conjure up visions of a waterway once overflowing with the great tuna fishing fleets of Portuguese and Italian immigrants.
In more recent years, refugees fleeing from poverty, economics and violence from places that include Somalia, Sudan, Colombia, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq have made a fresh start here and now call San Diego home.
While the new facility celebrates the richness and diversity of new Americans, the word “immigration” has become so synonymous with “illegal immigration” that the board of directors voted to leave it out of the museum’s name, even though it is part of the associated New Americans Immigration Museum and Learning Center, Inc.
For more information about the museum, call (619) 255 8908, or visit www.newamericansmuseum.org.