Northeastern Artists-in-Residence open new show at Gallery 360
“Waves of Hidden Histories,” art show on Boston’s Chinatown activist history opens Wednesday
Amid the clutter of ladders, tape and brown butcher’s paper, two frazzled artists hurried to hang posters, measure tapestries and assemble artifacts, inside Gallery 360, Northeastern University’s glass-walled, 1,000-square-foot art space that is gearing up to showcase a new exhibit this week.
The contemporary art show, called “Waves of Hidden Histories,” focuses on the forgotten days of activism in Boston’s Chinatown and is set to run from Aug. 26 through Dec. 5 at the university’s Curry Student Center. It combines a year’s worth of archival research, reproduced copies of the original call-to-action pamphlets and multimedia art posters depicting grassroots mobilization in the city’s predominantly Asian-American neighborhood from decades ago.
“We’re in the fishbowl,” said Juliana Barton, director of Northeastern’s Center for the Arts, as she referred to the gallery’s uncovered glass facade that allows passersby to peer inside and catch a glimpse of the historical exhibit, without even entering – much to Barton’s delight.
A historian and curator of Gallery 360, she was recently lending a hand to interdisciplinary artists Lani Asunción and Joanna Tam.
Both Tam, 54, and Asunción, 44, are long established in the Boston arts community, and are in the last semester of their 2025-2026 Hidden Histories Artist-in-Residence Program at Northeastern – a program that brings in artists who are given a stipend and a materials budget to work on Boston history focused projects. The Gallery 360 show is part of their overall study project called “Weaving Through History and Activism in Boston Chinatown.”
Their goal is to engage the audience with historically underrepresented narratives by using artifacts, images, print collages and video, Barton said.
“The artists can tell the stories of the wonderful, vibrant history in a way books can’t,” she added. “The idea is to engage the audience with archival materials.”
Along the walls are images of ocean waves, signifying the connection all people have to the world, said Asunción. Some of the images are overlaid with a collage of protest and civic organizing pamphlets written in Cantonese and Mandarin languages. There’s also a television featuring black-and-white photos, rolling in a loop on the screen, of protests in Chinatown.
“This is not something that you see in the history books or in the media,” Tam said. “But there is a history of a lot of Asian American activism there. We want people to know. We also want to uplift their stories and inspire people to put faith in civic engagement.”
The artists said that they chose Chinatown as a topic because they both have Asian roots and an interest in grassroots activism.
The show spotlights the 1985 demonstrations over the sudden closure of the P&L Sportswear factory in Chinatown that left hundreds of Chinese immigrants without jobs or severance pay. Local groups, such as the Chinese Progressive Association, a Boston-based group that advocates for social justice in the Asian community, rallied workers to demand economic justice and support from local and state lawmakers.
Some of the documents on display included Mandarin and Cantonese protest song lyrics and music notes. Those languages have filled the air ever since the community was established as Chinatown in the 1870s, when low-rents in Boston’s South Cove neighborhood attracted Chinese immigrants to work in shoe factories and other industries.
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During the year-long residency, Tam and Asunción conducted research at Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections and also held workshops this summer, including a community project where visitors helped make Chinese “dragon heads” for boat prows at the city’s annual Dragon Boat Festival.
The Gallery 360 exhibit features two unfinished traditional Chinese dragon heads and visitors are encouraged to sit at a work table and make decorative scales to be attached to the mythical creatures.
“I like what we’ve done, and I’m proud,” Asunción said. “I think if people come across our show, I hope they learn some history about Chinatown. It’s not just a place to shop and eat. It has a rich history.”
Their work was also supported by the Reckonings Project, which is a Boston-based initiative billed as a local history platform for community archivists. It supports various artists-in-residence programs, as well as projects on local Black and Asian activists and arts and music.
Dzidzor Azaglo, a performance artist and a Northeastern University community partnership coordinator at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, commended the artists’ work for highlighting the stories of grassroots organizers fighting for social justice – an issue which continues to resonate among Boston’s Chinatown community today, she said.
“The role of an artist is to reflect the times, to remember, and to preserve ourselves,” she said.
