Ethnic Diversity in Cultural Institutions

The Asia Society

The Asia Society was founded by John Davison Rockefeller III in 1956. The organization was initially established to enhance cultural understanding between Americans and Asians, but now it has become a global institution with branches throughout the US and Asia (Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York, Hong Kong, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, and Sydney).

The Society’s Manhattan headquarters boasts a small-but-superb art collection of nearly 300 Asian masterworks completed between 2,000 B.C. and the 19th century, including Chinese landscape paintings, Indian temple hangings and sculptures, Japanese Buddhist art and Rinpa paintings, Korean ceramics, Indonesian textiles, Cambodian and Thai sculptures.

At the beginning, the organization’s targeting audiences were Americans who were not familiar with Asian cultures. But over the past decade, the Society has been trying to transform itself into an international organization. The Society now defines itself as an “educational organization dedicated to promoting mutual understanding and strengthening partnerships among peoples, leaders and institutions of Asia and the United States in a global context” (Asia Society). The Society has been setting up more branches to reach to more audiences. It had a major expansion in 2012 with two new multimillion-dollar buildings in Hong Kong and Houston, Texas.

The organization’s Education department has two objectives: “one focusing on teaching and learning about Asia in the United States and the other on the expansion of US investments in international studies at the elementary and secondary school levels” (Wiki). The organization believes that “international education generally encompasses the knowledge of other world regions, cultures and global issues; skills in communicating in languages other than English, working in global or cross-cultural environments and using information from different sources around the world; and values of respect and concern for other cultures and peoples” (Wiki). To achieve the goal, the Society has been working with a group of public elementary and secondary schools in the US to educate the kids about the Asia.

The Folger Shakespeare Library

As an independent research library in D.C., the Folger Shakespeare Library has the world's largest collection of William Shakespeare's printed works and many rare Renaissance books and manuscripts.

The institution aims to serve as a research and learning center for scholars, teachers and students. As its website describes, “thousands of scholars from more than 70 institutions in 20 different countries visit the Folger’s reading rooms each year to research a wide variety of topics on Shakespeare and the Renaissance”. It also provides scholarly programs and a variety of K–12 education programs for both students