Exhibit: Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams

Across many regions of Asia, temples serve as a site of ritual and ceremony, offering protection for ancestors and their descendants of the land. This exhibition invites you to invoke and honor Chinatown as a temple that holds ancestral histories and dreams. The segregated burial grounds at Mt Hope Cemetery, the bulldozing of neighborhood life through urban development and gentrification, the echoes of children laughing, and the voices of labor and community organizing are but a few examples that evidence histories of struggle and resilience in Boston Chinatown and Asian diasporic communities. In observance of these lineages, this exhibition serves as a portal for grief work that can open towards respite and healing.

Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams remembers and honors those who have come before us—blood, chosen, and place-based ancestors, those who have dreamed of our existence today. This multi-disciplinary exhibit activates Chinatown as a memory archive, a diasporic temple, a space for spiritual, ancestral, and communal refuge.