Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) Records

The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC), founded in 1974 as the Asian American Dance Theatre, is one of the oldest community arts organizations in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Partners Robert (Bob) Lee, a curator, author, and current executive director, and Eleanor Yung, a choreographer and acupuncturist, established AAAC to promote and support Asian American artists and their work. One of AAAC’s early initiatives was the creation of the Asian American Artists’ Slide Archive in 1982. The archive was one of the first public archives to focus on Asian American artists in the US. Artist vertical files were collected to form a permanent research archive documenting the history of Asian American artists in the US from 1945 to the present. In 2007, 150 of the archive’s more than 1,500 artist files were digitized and made available on AAAC’s website, artspiral.org.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Lee moved to New York City in 1970. He studied art history at the City College of New York. He became involved in Asian American community organizations including Basement Workshop, where he and Yung met. Yung moved to New York City in 1969, after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. She helped incorporate Basement Workshop as a non-profit in 1970, and worked collaboratively to develop its dance programs. Lee and Yung’s extensive collection includes artwork and art publications, research files from a 1969 Chinatown study Danny Yung (Eleanor’s brother) conducted, and documentation of both the founding of Basement Workshop and the AAAC.

To learn more about the contents of the Asian American Arts Centre Records, located at the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, view the finding aid.

Image: Crop of the exhibition postcard for China: June 4, 1989…, 1992, featuring The Last Banquet (1989) by Zhang Hongtu; Asian American Arts Centre Records; TAM 613; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.