Christina “Chrissy” Shimizu’s favorite exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum has powerful parallels to the present moment.
Shimizu, who was hired as executive director of the Wing Luke Museum in March, was walking through a special exhibit called “Lost & Found: Searching For Home” when she saw a leather-bound copy of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
At the time, Minneapolis was under occupation by ICE, which had unleashed more attacks on immigrant communities across the country. “Just seeing that artifact, I was like wow, this is so relevant to where we are now,” she said. She was struck by clear connections to the Trump administration’s executive orders and legislation attempting to dismantle immigrant rights, and the national climate of fear and hate.
“There’s so much to learn from history repeating itself, and from what my community was experiencing at the time, too,” Shimizu said. “Understanding what new laws meant for executive orders, and how to protect our communities, both legally and through community action.”
“Lost & Found: Searching For Home,” which opened in November 2024 and will still be on view until September 14 this year, also struck Shimizu as a powerful summation of the Wing’s democratic, forward-looking ethos.
It’s a role she hopes to play in leading the museum, which will celebrate its 60-year anniversary next year: Learning from generations of activism and history, and helping the Wing community dream its new future.
Shimizu was hired after a year-long, national search. She was previously the museum’s director of individual giving from 2017 to 2021. The national search found several candidates, according to the Wing. Shimizu was the unanimous choice after three rounds of interviews. She began on May 11.
“Christina is a dynamic leader with a proven track record of serving marginalized communities,” said Ellen Ferguson, former president of the Wing Luke Museum Board of Trustees, in a press release. “She is energetic and effective in transition management, staff engagement and community coalition building.”
Shimizu was born and raised in Seattle to a Japanese American father and a white mother from Tennessee. Her father’s family had deep roots in Washington state, and her grandparents, along with other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, were incarcerated in concentration camps during WWII. They moved to Japan, where her father was born after the war, but faced discrimination, and returned to the Northwest when he was 13. The family had a shiatsu massage business in the CID.
Before coming to the Wing as director, Shimizu was previously executive director of Puget Sound Sage. She is a co-founder of Community Centric Fundraising and the former Board President of Asian Pacific Americans for Civic Empowerment Votes (APACE).
Speaking with the Examiner just over two weeks into the job, Shimizu reflected that even though she had worked at the museum before, the museum and surrounding neighborhood are an inexhaustible source of stories, history, and meaningful relationships. “I think the number one word that comes to mind is humility,” she said. “I feel like I’m stepping into a very long legacy of work of leading the museum and the mission and vision of it, and I just feel the profound responsibility.”
Her onboarding involved getting up to speed on where the museum has been in the five years since she left, but especially building relationships internally and with the community. She spent the onboarding meeting with staff, the board, funders, other local and national museum leaders, and anticipated meeting neighborhood organizations, businesses, past directors and people who shaped the institution.
Shimizu took away lessons from working with previous Wing director Beth Takekawa and deputy director Cassie Chinn. “They were incredible facilitators of community processes, of building buy-in and doing stakeholdering very well, and managing relationships,” Shimizu said.
She was inspired by their work ensuring the museum played a role in preserving the neighborhood, and its role in the community.
Shimizu joined in advance of the opening of the Eng Family Homestead in August. The Wing purchased the home and will turn it into a permanent exhibit for the community. She sees this as a good example of the museum’s role in the neighborhood: taking a piece of land off the speculative real estate market and making it a permanent exhibit owned by the community.
“I see the museum not only as being a steward of our histories and of our stories and culture, but also being a steward of the land and the people,” she said. “The people who live in this neighborhood are immigrant, working-class people, people with families, people who have all different racial backgrounds, as well, and so I think the museum’s role is to also think more broadly about preserving what makes the CID the CID, and that work to combat displacement.”
Shimizu spent time organizing as an anti-displacement and gentrification activist with the CID Coalition, and at Sage, Shimizu’s work often took on an activist bent.
“There is the role of the museum, right, to create space where people can see themselves, their histories, and their communities reflected,” she said. “It’s not only culturally important, it’s essential really to the health and resilience of our community broadly.”
The museum always has a mission of advocacy, Shimizu said. “We are part of an ecosystem, and I think that, even though our role is not directly in advocacy, there is the spirit of that,” she said. “The magic of the museum is that everybody is welcome here, that we are not a partisan space, and we are a space where, where there is the opportunity for learning, and there’s the opportunity for bridge building, and there’s the opportunity for healing and relationship building.”
In May 2024, the Wing made national headlines after about two dozen staff walked out in protest of an exhibit the Wing was a co-partner in, called “Confronting Hate Together.” The exhibit examined how Black, Asian and Jewish communities in Seattle have faced racism and antisemitism in the past and present. The walkout occurred on the day of the exhibit’s debut. Staff protested that language in the exhibit falsely conflated anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation with anti-Semitism and terrorism, and they further criticized the lack of Palestinian and Muslim voices in the exhibit language.
The walkout closed the museum for most of June 2024. Its complex fallout was also a factor that former Wing director Joël Barraquiel Tan named as a reason for his departure, in September 2024. Kamahanahokulani Farrar was then appointed to the role, which she held for around 18 months.
Although Shimizu was not working at the Wing at the time, she believes there are lessons to learn from it, such as the importance of building trust across the institution.
“Many organizations, I feel, have gone through similar moments of reckoning,” she said. “In politically charged environments, there’s pressure to react quickly or to retreat, and that in order to navigate like those moments truly effectively, institutions have to invest in things long before.”
For Shimizu, these include transparent decision making processes, trainings in conflict resolution, building trust across both staff and community stakeholders. “Relationships that are actually deep and durable and reciprocal and all of that, is important,” she said. “You can’t expect to move through crisis well if you don’t have those building blocks.”
Shimizu continued: “If anything, we’ve seen the frequency of political tensions increase, and so we need to learn how to move through them, and that means that we also have to have clarity, and we have to be explicit about what we stand for and why, and knowing where our red lines are, and when a red line has been crossed, and how we will engage in political discourse based on our goal as a museum.”
Next year, the Wing will mark its 60-year anniversary. “This is the moment where we get to reflect on where we’ve been the last 60 years, but also where we’re headed, and what the museum can be in the next iteration,” Shimizu said.
Personally, Shimizu is excited to return to the museum, and help write its new chapter, and she thinks the museum and community are ready for the next step, after several leadership transitions.
“There’s a buzz inside of the museum right now, where folks are just really excited to come together…to just really stabilize and dream up together like what our next chapter is going to look like,” she said. “I’m really excited and very honored to be able to facilitate the dream-making and the building of what comes next for us.”
