A traditional Marshallese wooden canoe called a kōrkōr, which was built at Crystal Bridges and featured in the program Wa Kuk Wa Jimor/Canoe of One Community in 2022. The kōrkōr will be featured again in the new 2024 exhibition. (courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)
Exhibition collaboration with the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese, Oct. 18, 2024 – March 31, 2025
In 1946, the residents of the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands were “asked” to leave their homeland so that the U.S. could conduct nuclear weapons tests. The effects of the tests on the islands, as well as on the diaspora that resulted, were devastating.
In 2021 the Washington Post provided a vivid picture of what the inhabitants endured. In 1954, for example, the government exploded the first weaponized hydrogen bomb, which was 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima: “Within hours, the atoll was covered with a fine, white, powder-like substance. No one knew it was radioactive fallout. The children played in the ‘snow,’ and even ate it.”
The story of the Marshallese diaspora is still largely unknown to most Americans despite the efforts of Lawrence Sumulong, a Brooklyn, New York-based photographer, whose collection of photos of the Marshallese can now be found in the University of Arkansas Library’s Special Collections. The story will be told, again, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art beginning Oct. 19.
Why Crystal Bridges, located in Bentonville, Arkansas? Because Springdale, Arkansas — located 50 miles south of Bentonville — is the largest Marshallese community in the United States, at more than 12,000 residents. There are approximately 15,000 people of Marshallese origin living in northwest Arkansas.
Providing a different perspective on the Marshallese migration, Crystal Bridges and the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese (ACOM) are partnering to present this exhibition. As the museum’s curator of contemporary art, Alejo Benedetti, hastens to make clear, however, the museum may be hosting the exhibition, but ACOM’s involvement assures that it will “infuse a reverence for tradition with an eagerness to celebrate Marshallese Indigenous culture here and now.” It promises to “weave in objects and stories shared from the community and works created by local artists and makers honoring their intergenerational connection.”
The title for the exhibition, “Navigating Lolelaplap” — Lolelaplap being the inhabitants’ name for the Marshall Islands — takes on a double meaning: literally representing the physical voyage of the Marshallese, and symbolically for the navigating they had to undertake on their cultural voyage.
As such, the exhibit promises to offer a complicated look into what it means to be a part of American society, itself the product of waves of immigrants over centuries. The story of the Marshallese is unique, but it is not unlike that which other immigrants have faced, and continue to face, complete with opportunities and challenges, triumphs and tragedies, as reflected in the Bikinis’ motto: “Moriba,” or “Everything is in God’s hands.”
