Robert Lee had the lonely task last week of slowly emptying the Asian American Arts Center’s home of 33 years at 26 Bowery.
Lee, the executive director and a founder of the nonprofit arts group, said Chinatown’s rising rents, combined with dropping grant money, forced him out of the neighborhood. The arts center will move its office into an Asian Americans for Equality outpost at 111 Norfolk St. on the Lower East Side but will no longer have its own exhibit space.
“We’ve always geared our purpose to having very little resources but doing work that would be of great value to the next generation,” Lee said. The center will shift its mission to the Internet, focusing on a digital archive culled from decades of exhibits.
When Lee first rented the third-floor space at 26 Bowery, the building was owned by one of the neighborhood’s last Jewish landlords and included a shoe and police uniform store. Now, McDonald’s rules the ground floor, and the Arts Center’s rent has risen far beyond the original several hundred dollars.
Lee and others founded A.A.A.C. as the first group focused on contemporary Asian-American dance, but they soon expanded to focus on visual arts as well. Lee said he has struggled for funding over the years as the group worked to gain a foothold in the city’s art world. While Lee is glad to see other Chinatown groups like the Museum of Chinese in America growing more successful, he wishes more grant money had flown in his direction, too.
To save on moving costs, Lee packed up the space himself and carted boxes over to the new location at night. Above right, he stands looking at the wooden sign that greeted visitors for 33 years. The Obama poster is a recent addition, covering the space where an exhibit notice would usually go.
— Julie Shapiro
