As a Smithsonian Affiliate Museum, the International Museum of Art & Science joins with the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center to share lesser-known stories during American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (May). We recognize this moment in history as an opportunity to stand with and uplift marginalized voices through a unified call for racial equality, justice, inclusion, and kindness.

Every heritage month, we aim to highlight stories with both a Smithsonian and Affiliates lens that expands knowledge and widen perspectives. We embrace and celebrate the fact that, even though it’s called “Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month,” no heritage is a monolith.

We hope that you find comfort and encouragement in this shared effort and join us in celebration, self-education, commemoration, and reflection as we usher in a time of real systemic change and stand in unity against hate, racism, and discrimination.

IMAS will continue to offer educational resources and learning opportunities to increase our social awareness and empathy to foster respect for all people and thereby enhance the overall quality of life for all members of our community. We commit to having open eyes and ears as we practice empathy within our organization and hold each other accountable to these principles. We commit to taking our ideals of inclusivity and fairness beyond the museum walls as we live and exist in our community as individuals.

American artists of Asian heritage bring a combined legacy to their work, and varieties of Asian thought and spiritual practice have had a profound and lasting influence on a remarkable number of Western artists. Influence has been a two-way street between contemporary American art practice and Asian cultures, past and present.

Visit smithsonianapa.org/stand to access a calendar of events and free resources created to support community education and self-care not just this month, but throughout the year. #AAPIHeritageMonth #AAPIHM

Poems, meditations, films, and other cultural nutrients for times like this. Curated with love by the Smithsonian APA Center 

Inhuman Figures is a film essay by Michelle N. Huang and CA Davis that excavates three popular science-fictional archetypes—the robot, clone, and alien—to reveal how imagined futures are produced from a long history of treating Asian Americans as tireless workers, indistinguishable copies, and forever foreigners.