Since its founding in 1980, MOCA has celebrated the living history of the Chinese experience in America by preserving and presenting the 200-year history, heritage, culture, and diverse experiences of American communities of Chinese descent. The Research & Collections Center is a publicly accessible research and oral history workspace.   For OHNY Weekend, MOCA is offering a behind-the-scenes tour of MOCA's Collections & Research Center and Q&A with Yue Ma, Director of the Collections and Research Center.

The MOCA Workshop, designed by multi-disciplinary design and concept firm Atelier Cho Thompson, is the Museum’s new Collections and Research Center, which was previously located at 70 Mulberry Street. Nine months after a devastating five-alarm fire at 70 Mulberry Street in January 2020, MOCA opened a new home for its extensive archive of over 85,000 artifacts that document the Chinese experience in America. As the name implies, the MOCA Workshop, located at 3 Howard Street one block away from the Museum, is a publicly accessible research space.   The MOCA Workshop’s storefront space serves as a reading room featuring the Museum’s extensive library of Chinese and Asian American history and literature. The remainder of the ground floor and the MOCA Workshop’s second floor house MOCA’s Collections and institutional archives, which were retrieved from 70 Mulberry Street after the fire.

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