Open House NY – MOCA Collections & Research Center

Since its founding in 1980, MOCA has celebrated the living history of the Chinese experience in America by preserving and presenting the 200-year history, heritage, culture, and diverse experiences of American communities of Chinese descent. The Research & Collections Center is a publicly accessible research and oral history workspace. Take a behind-the-scenes tour of MOCA’s Collections & Research Center and partake in a Q&A with Yue Ma, Director of the Collections and Research Center.

MOCA Workshop is the home base for MOCA’s fire recovery and conservation work, featuring state-of-the-art collections storage, a reference library, and digitization stations. On January 23, 2020, MOCA experienced a devastating five-alarm fire at its collections and archives site in the heart of Chinatown. In the days that followed, MOCA received an unprecedented outpouring of support from volunteers, community members, and professional institutions from near and far that was critical to the successful rescue of MOCA’s archives from the fire-damaged building. MOCA’s volunteers’ crucial collective efforts helped it save 90 percent of this invaluable 85,000-object collection of Chinese American history and heritage. Since October 2020, MOCA’s archives have been safely relocated to the MOCA Workshop for ongoing and multi-pronged fire recovery and conservation efforts.