As the crow flies, the Marshall Islands lie roughly 6,180 miles from Arkansas. Which is to say, a landlocked state isn’t exactly the first place you would expect to host an introduction of sorts to a Pacific Ocean–based culture. And yet, the new exhibition Navigating Lolelaplap, the Marshallese name for the islands, is doing just that—with good reason. “Guess what? The people are here,” says Melisa Laelan, the founder and chief executive director of the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese. The exhibition, which opens October 19 at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, does offer a window to the past—explaining how since the 1980s, nearly a quarter of the world’s Marshallese population, displaced by sixty-seven atmospheric nuclear bomb tests conducted by the United States, have found their way to Northwest Arkansas. But it also encompasses the current moment. Every item, whether a woven mat made from pandanus leaves or a contemporary dress emblazoned with grid lines suggestive of maritime navigation, reflects not just a culture but a people. “The emotions, the feeling of attachment to our culture, to our identity, to our ocean,” Laelan says, “everything that’s in that exhibition is really what makes this Lolelaplap.”
Southern Agenda