Orange County Archives in Action

Performance
Outside the Hangar 244

Hansori is a student performance group at University of California, Irvine dedicated to sharing and celebrating Korean traditional music and culture. The ensemble performs pieces rooted in Korean musical traditions, often incorporating percussion, vocal elements, and traditional instrumentation.

Through campus performances, cultural events, and community programs, Hansori introduces audiences to the rhythms, stories, and cultural significance of Korean music while creating a space for students to learn, practice, and share Korean performing arts traditions with the broader UC Irvine community.

Presentations
The Studio 11-1pm

• 11:00am – Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
• 11:15am – OC Public Libraries Garden Grove Tibor Rubin Branch
• 11:30am – LibroMobile Arts Cooperative
• 11:45am – Vietnamese Heritage Museum
• 12:15pm – Blas Aguilar Adobe Foundation
• 12:30pm – Asian American Museum at Great Park

First Lady Pat Nixon’s Coat

From color to construction, the clothing that First Lady Pat Nixon wore was crucial. 55 years later, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum is discussing the iconic red coat Mrs. Nixon wore on the diplomatic trip to China in 1971. The talk will cover the coat’s life from its designer creation to its conservation within the museum.

Natalie Vandercook’s background is in museum collections and public history with a special focus on textiles. She is the museum technician at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and her work aims to make museum holdings more accessible.

OC Stories: Celebrating the People, Places, and Events That Make Us Who We Are

Hosted by OC Public Libraries, OC Stories is an online digital archive that celebrates the rich cultural diversity of Orange County. Through documents, images, and oral history videos, we preserve and share voices from the County’s past while looking toward its future.

Marisa Saam is a Librarian II and Branch Manager for OC Public Libraries at the Garden Grove Tibor Rubin branch. In this role, she oversees library operations, staff, and public programming while working to expand equitable access to information, literacy resources, and community services.

LibroMobile Arts Cooperative

Sarah Rafael García is a writer, educator, and cultural organizer based in Santa Ana, California. She is the founder and executive director of LibroMobile Arts Cooperative, a hybrid non-profit organization dedicated to amplifying the voices and stories of writers, authors and memory-keepers from historically underrepresented communities. Through LibroMobile, García has created programs that support community writing, storytelling, and literary access in Orange County, including workshops, readings, publishing, and digital humanities projects.

García is also the author of the hybrid memoir SanTana’s Fairy Tales, which reflects on family history, migration, and community life in Santa Ana. Her work bridges literature, education, and grassroots cultural work, and she has been widely recognized for building spaces that nurture emerging writers and celebrate the cultural histories of Southern California communities.

From Silk to Sea: The Living Archives

This presentation explores how archives live through textiles, music, oral histories, and personal artifacts that embody the lived experiences of Orange County’s Vietnamese diaspora. Centered on the story of a 100-year-old áo dài carried across generations and culminating with the journey of the “Boat of Hope,” the talk reflects on how objects become vessels of identity, resilience, and cultural continuity. It invites audiences to see archives not as static collections, but as living connections that shape our shared humanity.

Chau Thuy is a survivor of a dramatic boat escape from Vietnam to Thailand. His extraordinary journey as a refugee determined his unique appreciation for life and freedom. As an act of homage to all Vietnamese Boat People, he decided to dedicate his life to educate the public and to raise awareness about their unimaginable tragedy. By creating calligraphy artworks, writing books, collecting artifacts, engaging Vietnamese community in preservation of Boat People and Vietnamese refugee history with a vision of Vietnamese Heritage Museum he constructs a real platform for preservation of the past but also embracement of the future of Vietnamese community abroad but also in the homeland. His message also addresses the ongoing refugee crisis, with millions of people being displaced in the world today.

Blas Aguilar Adobe Foundation

Domingo Belardes is a cultural advocate and community leader in Orange County, California, who serves as president of the Blas Aguilar Adobe Foundation. Through his leadership, Belardes works to preserve and share the history of the Blas Aguilar Adobe, one of the oldest remaining adobe homes in the region and an important site connected to early Californio and Indigenous histories of Orange County.

Belardes has been active in community education, historical interpretation, and cultural programming that highlight the legacy of early families and communities in the area. His work with the foundation focuses on protecting the adobe as a historic landmark while fostering greater public understanding of the region’s layered cultural heritage.

The Living Archive – A Spatial History of Little Saigon

Join Dr. Thuy Vo Dang and Dr. Tony Hwang for a live demonstration of The Living Archive, a groundbreaking mobile platform developed by the Asian American Museum at the Great Park. This session explores the powerful intersection of history and immersive technology, showcasing how the streets of Westminster’s Little Saigon have been transformed into a “living museum.”

During this presentation, we will demonstrate how the app utilizes augmented reality (AR) and AI-restored oral histories to uncover the lesser-known narratives of the Vietnamese American diaspora. From the transnational “care package” economy of Danh’s Pharmacy to the historic community mobilization of the Hi-Tek Video protests, attendees will see firsthand how digital tools can deepen our connection to physical landmarks and the stories they hold.

We invite all participants to bring their smartphones for a hands-on demo. You’ll have the opportunity to download the app and engage directly with the digital layers of our community’s resilient past. Come discover how we are preserving the “people’s geography” of Orange County for a new generation.

Thuy Vo Dang is a historian, archivist, and author whose work focuses on Vietnamese American history, refugee memory, and community archives in Southern California. She is Assistant Professor of Information Studies & Asian American Studies, Co-Director of the Community Archives Lab at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. She is also, among many other roles, coauthor of A People’s Guide to Orange County (2022) and Vietnamese in Orange County (2015).

Vo Dang’s work bridges academic scholarship and community collaboration through oral history, archival preservation, and public programming. She is also involved with the development of the Asian American Museum at the Great Park and a long-time board member of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association and Arts OC.

Tony Hwang is a strategic leader in higher education and community advocacy with over two decades of experience in enrollment management and student success. As the Executive Director of the Office of Enrollment Management at the UC Irvine, he has provided strategic leadership for undergraduate enrollment planning and outreach initiatives that support the university’s mission of access and academic excellence.

A leader at the intersection of education and technology, Tony specializes in leveraging AI and XR technologies to enhance educational access and engagement. In addition to his work at UCI, he is deeply engaged in regional community initiatives—including the development of the Asian American Museum at the Great Park—where he helps advance efforts to recognize and share the histories and contributions of Asian American communities in Orange County.

Great Park Gallery: Three Artist, Three Perspectives
1-2pm at the Gallery

Daniela García Hamilton: Embroidered Paintings

Daniela García Hamilton is a Mexican-American artist whose vibrant, embroidered paintings reflect the traditions, stories, and memories that shaped her childhood. Through visual storytelling, she explores what it’s like to grow up between two cultures — expressing ideas about identity, belonging, and the experience of navigating more than one world at once.

The Diver

Kristina Rose Baker: The Diver presents new large-scale paintings and drawings by California-based artist and Irvine native Kristina Rose Baker. Drawing on over 2,500 years of art historical representations of diving, Baker re-imagines the figure in moments of suspension — between water, earth, and sky. With her distinct use of oil paint and charcoal, she captures fleeting moments between motion and stillness, presence and absence.

This is Krazy!

Since the 1950s, comic strips have profoundly influenced artists — fueling bold, graphic imagery drawn from everyday life and pop culture, helping launch the Pop Art movement. That influence lives on in the work of contemporary California-based painter Vonn Sumner, who continues this tradition by reimagining Krazy Kat, the American comic strip created by George Herriman. Sumner uses Krazy Kat as a vehicle for visual storytelling, placing the character in surreal, painterly narratives that blend art history, mythology, and introspective humor.