#oakland museum of california

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Grace Hudson (1865-1937) "To-Tole (The Star)" (1894) Oil on canvas Located in the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California, United States

[garadinervi]

June Jordan, (Berkeley, CA, 11:04 p.m., September 25, 2001), Do You Do Well to Be Angry?, «The Progressive» Magazine, November 1, 2001

(image: June Jordan: Poetry for the People, U.C. Berkeley, 1992. Artwork by Hal BrightCloud. Poem: On a New Year's Eve, from Things That I Do In The Dark (1981). Poetry for the People program records, 1991-2010, CES ARC 2018/1, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA)

[ghost-37]

Angela Davis - Seize The Time (2023) Oakland Museum of California

[simonh]

Aristotle's Cage by Thomas Hawk

[g0blingirll]

up close @ OMCA • 09.26.2023

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

ONE OF THE MOST ON POINT INDICTMENTS OF AMERICAN "DEMOCRACY" IN DESIGN HISTORY.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on the now oft-quoted "Democracy, We Deliver" anti-war poster, on offset lithograph paper, artwork by John Yates for Stealworks, c. 1993.

PIC #2: Identical graphic with different typography, later used as artwork for the CD liner notes to "Point Blank," the 1994 debut studio album by industrial thrash metal band NAILBOMB.

Sources: https://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010543734 & Flickr.

[blizzard-of-ozz]

Elsewhere at the OMCA

[wwwdlabrie]

Friday 3/10 - HIP HOP CONGRESSS(HHC) + H2E2 - 8am-630pm Kick off event - Suga T(The Click), Martha Diaz, Kev Choice & more! AME Institute Pop-up Oakland - Celebrating Hip Hop 50 year Anniversary & Hip Hop Education

Friday 3/10 - HIP HOP CONGRESSS(HHC) + H2E2 - 8am-630pm Kick off event - Suga T(The Click), Martha Diaz, Kev Choice & more! AME Institute Pop-up Oakland - Celebrating Hip Hop 50 year Anniversary & Hip Hop Education

Friday 3/10 – HIP HOP CONGRESSS(HHC) + H2E2 – 8am-630pm Kick off event – Suga T(The Click), Martha Diaz, Kev Choice & more! AME Institute Pop-up Oakland – Celebrating Hip Hop 50 year Anniversary & Hip Hop Education Click Here to Register! Will Sell Out Fast Harlem, New York – Martha Diaz & DLabrie discussing Hip Hop and Education ! We ran into DJ D-Nice at Lunch Click Here to Register! Will…

[longlistshort]

The image above is of Squeak Carnwath’s painting, Best Borrowed, 2005, Oil and alkyd on canvas, taken at Palm Springs Art Museum in 2018.

A solo exhibition of her work is currently at Pt.2 Gallery in Oakland, California, on view until 2/16/24.

[aradxan]

April Gutel by Thomas Hawk https://flic.kr/p/2omzYk4

[garadinervi]

George Jackson (September 23, 1941 – August 21, 1971)

(image: George Jackson 1941-1971, w/ 'Song in Blood and Tears' (A People's Poem by Askia Muhammed Toure), San Francisco, CA, 1972. Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), Oakland, CA)

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Laurence Cuneo

Portrait of Ruth Asawa at her Completing the Circle exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, 2002.

[simonh]

Clarity by Thomas Hawk

[solarpunkbusiness]

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

“Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

[dangerousthingobservation]

An F2H-2 Banshee of Fighter Squadron (VF) 44 pictured on the ground at Naval Air Station (NAS) Oakland, California, on February 13, 1955, fifty-nine years ago today. By National Naval Aviation Museum

[bremser]

Here in the United States, we are once again faced with a candidate and political party promising ethnic cleansing. One reason we keep repeating atrocities is a large swath of the population refuses to accept our history. Dorothea Lange’s photos are that history. 

Lange's body of work is unique among the photographers who documented the Japanese internment, because she created photographs around the San Francisco Bay Area before and during the round-up (called “evacuation”) and later documented life in the camps (called “resettlement”).

Calisphere (featuring the University of California's archive) has 6,867 photos from the internment. There are about 850 Lange images in the collection. There are various places online to see curated selections of these photographs, but having the source archive, with the original captions on the print's verso side intact, is essential. 

Lange was working for the government doing the round-up, but her portraits reveal empathy and the captions provide some editorial commentary. The government expected her to show that life in the camps wasn't too terrible, what they saw in the photos (and read in her captions) made them bury the archive for decades.

caption:  A close-out sale--prior to evacuation--at store operated by proprietor of Japanese ancestry on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. April 4, 1942.

With Lange's portraits of Japanese-Americans, you see a direct line of empathy to her Depression-era portraits. But the archive also has many topographical observations from San Francisco, signage and newspapers warning the Japanese of their imminent departure, newly vacant Victorians and Japanese restaurants given over to "new ownership." She notices details as small as a sign giving away kittens in the window of a home of a Japanese family. One of the most famous photos from the evacuation shows a Japanese-owned business in Oakland protesting with a large sign that reads: I AM AN AMERICAN.

After seeing city life in San Francisco, the Manzanar camp looks especially wind swept and isolated. Up to this point, nearly every photographer working in the Sierras had treated them as a scenic wonder, but in the background of Lange's photos from Manzanar, they are an impassable barrier to the residents' previous lives.

Other places online to see these photographs:

A curated selection from a 2017 NYT Lens blog post (RIP)

Excerpt from the American Masters documentary  on Lange (“Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning”) about her internment photographs

Library of Congress selection of War Relocation photos (277 total, 79 by Lange)

Oakland Museum of California holds the Lange archive and has a dedicated site to her work, with a page about the internment photographs

2016 NPR Code Switch segment about the photographs

Manzanar National Historic Site’s selection of photographs (including Ansel Adams)