Sam Dean

A double opening at the Museum of Chinese in America announces an exciting new era for the institution may be at hand:

Two exhibition openings and the welcoming of a new executive director herald a new era for the Museum of Chinese in America

Bio: Sam Dean is a freelance writer and the blogger for Bon Appétit. He lives in Brooklyn, and tweets @samaugustdean.

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A double opening at the Museum of Chinese in America announces an exciting new era for the institution may be at hand

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MoCA, like other small, ethnically focused museums, occupies a unique place in the museum world, floating between history and art, with the potential to go in both directions. Founded strictly as a history museum (it was originally called the New York Chinatown History Project), MoCA has always had a mandate to preserve the cultural memory of Chinese-Americans and support the local community. But now, with a move to a new Maya Lin-designed building on Centre and Grand Streets (and art-centric curators), the museum has the will and the walls to host contemporary artists and special exhibitions. (Lin is also a co-chair of the museum's board.) More

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By Sam Dean

on April 27th, 2012 6:20pm

 
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Production designer Mark Friedberg shares the secrets of making the cinematic worlds of Wes Anderson, Ang Lee and Todd Haynes

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“I made my career on films that probably shouldn’t have been made, economically,” said production designer Mark Friedberg at the first in a new series of quarterly master classes at the Museum of the Moving Image this past Sunday afternoon. More

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By Sam Dean

on March 27th, 2012 6:38pm

 
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Early '80s downtown film fixture Sara Driver gets an Anthology retrospective, including one film thought lost forever

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Filmmaker Sara Driver, whose intense, dreamlike work made her a crucial member of New York’s early-‘80s downtown film scene had, until recently, fallen out of circulation. Now she is the subject of a welcome retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, starting tonight. Driver has only directed four movies in the past 30 years, but her better films, 1981’s You Are Not I and 1986’s Sleepwalk, are iconic and eerily gripping, set apart by their narrative pace and sly supernatural darkness. More

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By Sam Dean

on March 23rd, 2012 3:49pm

 
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Eddie Huang, Wesley Yang, and others ponder the question: 'Are Asians black?'

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Are Asians black? It seemed less strange to ask Tuesday night, when, sitting in the large white events space at the Museum of Chinese in America Tuesday night, a freestyle Jadakiss jam filled the air and chef and food media personality Eddie Huang burst into the room, rapping along with the money rhyme, "Yeah you know I'm in the hood like Chinese wings!" More

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By Sam Dean

on March 23rd, 2012 3:00pm

 
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Chinatown gets its own restaurant week, despite neighborhood skeptics

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Three hundred and six restaurants participated in last month’s NYC Restaurant Week, offering cheap prix-fixe meals to aspirational diners in exchange for publicity and extra business. South of 110th street, almost all of Manhattan was represented, from Tribeca to the Upper East Side. But if you actually made a map of the participating restaurants, you’d notice a blank area downtown without a single dot, the kind of visual void you’d expect to be a park, or an industrial wasteland. As far as Restaurant Week is concerned, Chinatown doesn’t exist. More

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By Sam Dean

on March 9th, 2012 9:05am