We Are Not Ethnomusicologists: Curating Music Fandom: A Lecture By Herb Tam
Herb Tam, Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), will discuss his curatorial work and MOCA’s role as a social history museum in New York’s Chinatown. Specifically, he will reflect on the 2019 exhibition The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging, which explored music history and culture in the Chinese American community. The exhibition delved into how Chinese immigrant communities have yearned for the “old country,” fashioned new American identities, or challenged stereotypes through their embrace of music forms as far-reaching as Cantonese opera, hip hop, Asian American Movement music, Taiwan love ballads, Canto-pop, western classical, karaoke, Beijing underground rock, and many other genres. Tam’s presentation will unpack the exhibition’s curatorial methodology, thematic tensions, and working process.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Music, and the Asian American Studies Program, with the support of Engaged Cornell.
Herb Tam has been the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) since 2011. In addition to The Moon Represents My Heart, Tam has also co-curated Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America (2016) and Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving (2016). In 2012 he curated America through a Chinese Lens, which surveyed photographs of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent. Tam has previously served as the Associate Curator at Exit Art and the Acting Associate Curator at the Queens Museum of Art. He has also curated solo exhibitions with artists Lee Mingwei, Rafael Sanchez and Regina Jose Galindo, and has worked on historical exhibitions about urban planner Robert Moses and alternative art spaces in New York. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a masters in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.