historical sight: boise chinatown

public art

The work consists of three stereoscopic viewers strategically placed at key locations in downtown Boise. Rather than offering a scenic view of a distant landscape, the internally-illuminated viewers reveal the invisible histories of their immediate sites.

When looking through the lenses, viewers see high-resolution historical photographs of Boise’s once-thriving Chinatown aligned with the locations of their early 20th-century photographers. By overlaying historical documents into the contemporary environment, the project highlights the erasure of a community.

Materials: cast-metal viewfinders, archival photographs, interpretive maps, poetry, and historical ephemera.