A living archive and curatorial research project, Best Kept Secret traces the material culture and visual arts of the Filipino American experience. Through field notes, ephemera, oral histories, and independent publishing, it documents the everyday and the overlooked—what we carry, make, wear, and remember.

Rooted in diasporic memory and shaped by contemporary expression, Best Kept Secret explores how Filipino communities preserve identity through art, fashion, literature, design, and sound. It is a platform for connection, visibility, and cultural authorship across generations.

Values:

Material Memory

Everyday objects are treated as archives—evidence of presence, resilience, and lived experience.

Cultural Authorship

Filipino stories told on our own terms, beyond institutional narratives or imposed frameworks.

Against Erasure

This work pushes back against forgetting—challenging the silences shaped by imperialism, colonization, and cultural amnesia that follows in diaspora.

Behind The Archive—

Charlie Kane is studying Museum & Curatorial Studies at The New School, focusing on archives, exhibition-making, and the material culture of the Filipino diaspora. Her curatorial research centers on everyday ephemera as vessels of memory and resistance.

As a first-generation Filipina American, Charlie is drawn to the fragmented, the handmade, and the passed down. Best Kept Secret is her response to the silences left by migration, colonization, and assimilation—a living archive and curatorial experiment tracing how we remember through what we keep.