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The centennial celebration at The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery on Saturday, October 7, was a day full of music, art-making, food and comedy that blended the modern with the ancient, the West with the East.  The event commemorated Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer’s donation of his massive collection of artworks to the Smithsonian in 1906, which became the foundation of Freer Gallery.

The rain did not dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm, as young children and their parents packed the corridors and the courtyard, lounging on mattresses laid out against the wall and learning to make lotus flower origami.  Following the tradition of Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, volunteers lit up the paper lotus flower lanterns after sundown and set them afloat in the pond in the courtyard.

A high school dropout, Charles Lang Freer began his career as a clerk at a cement factory in Detroit and later made his fortune in railroad.  After traveling around the world and acquiring an art collection on par with those of J. Pierpont Morgan and Peggy Guggenheim, he sold his entire collection of Asian art to the Smithsonian for $1 in 1906 and funded the construction of Freer Gallery, which together with Sackler Gallery make up the National Museum of Asian Art.

The gallery’s prized collection ranges from fourth-century Old Testament Greek manuscript to tenth-century Chinese ceramics, but the celebration on Saturday was as modern and American as it could be.  The performers utilized the relatively new and American art forms of jazz and stand-up comedy to explore their cultural traditions and identities.

Rudresh Mahanthapa, a New York-based jazz saxophonist, brought his playful and energetic music to a packed auditorium.  In a quirky piece called “Enhanced Performance,” Mahanthapa and his ensemble began with a standard, laidback motif but soon accelerated to a frenetic speed, as if on steroid.  A second-generation Indian American, Mahanthapa attributed his own hybrid cultural identity as one of the impetus of his musical career.

“There’s no notion of exoticism.  It’s more about dealing with Indian music on a conceptual level,” he said. 

The exploration of cultural identity continued into the evening with performance by two up-and-coming stand-up comedians, Frank Hong and Vijai Nathan, both DC natives.  Looking like an awkward teenager with his shaggy hair and oversized shirt, Hong’s gags ranged from biting sarcasm to outright silliness.  His often irreverent takes on ethnic stereotypes, from the Asian manicurist to “the cool black guy on TV,” had the audience roaring with laughter.  Hong, however, admitted that he tends to stay away from too many Asian jokes for fear of being stereotyped. 

“I find humor in the most random things, some of them Asian, some of them not,” he said.  “I try to be unique.  I want my audience to enjoy my stuff not because of my race.”

On the other hand, Vijai Nathan found ample material from her experience as an Indian American teenager growing up in predominantly white Potomac, Maryland.

“It’s very hard to raise two Indian parents in America,” the bubbly comedienne announced at the beginning of her performance, eliciting huge applause among both the young and the old.  Nathan did a wickedly good Indian accent, and her infectious energy and warmth instantly charmed the audience, who were screaming for more by the end of the evening.

Nathan ended her performance with a skit from her one-woman show, "Good Girls Don't, But Indian Girls Do," in which she talked with candid humor about her failed love affair, a canceled wedding and a newly found sense of identity.

“It was a kind of love story… I did not get married,” she proclaimed onstage and ended the day with a perfect note.

“But I found myself,” she said.