#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

[bugkisserr]

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

[choiceofgames]

Meetup

Sign up to join Choice of Games co-founder Dan Fabulich for an Interactive Fiction meetup online or in person in Oakland, California at The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. Play new games and meet fellow nerds.

https://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/

This month, we'll play the games newly available as part of the Spring Thing! https://www.springthing.net/2025/

And, uh, wow, we've been having this meetup for 15 years!! I'd really love for this to be a big event in person. I'll meet y'all next door at Swann's Market at noon for lunch, and then we'll convene at the MADE next door at 1pm.

Even if you can't make it in person, we'll still host a Zoom as always, so you're always welcome to pop in there, too.

[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.

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Laurence Cuneo

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

[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)

[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

[simonh]

Clarity by Thomas Hawk

[bremser]

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)

[scotianostra]

November 13th 1850 saw the birth in Edinburgh of Robert Louis Stevenson, the renowned essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books.

Nowadays we remember the man with an anual event, Robert Louis Stevenson Day 2024 includes a number of events for fans to attend. The event which includes readings, screen shows and an unbirthday party. Although most events take place here in Edinburgh on Saturday you can find the unbirthday party in Monterey Public Library, Clifornia. Remarkaqbly this dates back to 1891 when Annie Ide, the 12-year-old daughter of the American Land Commissioner in Samoa, told RLS of her disappointment that there were no special celebrations to mark her birthday on Christmas Day, he came up with an ingenious solution. As a qualified Scottish advocate, he drew up a legal document declaring: ‘I, Robert Louis Stevenson . . . have transferred and do hereby transfer to the said A.H. Ide, all and whole my rights and privileges in the thirteenth day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby and henceforth, the birthday of the said A.H. Ide.’ Now each year the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Monterey holds aan event as such.

Stevenson had a brief sojourn in the Californian town in 1879, he went there to court Fanny Osbourne, a woman he met in France and fallen deeply in love with. Fanny was from Oakland and had returned to attempt a divorce from her husband. She had summoned Stevenson from his family home in Edinburgh and he readily obeyed her request. He wrote a memoir of his journey from New York through the heart of America, to the West coast in The Amateur Emigrant. Although brief, Stevenson’s time in Northern California deeply affected his work, inspiring his classic tales of adventure. RLS boarded at the French Hotel there, it is now known as Stevenson Houseand is a museum and property of the Monterey State Historic Park. t holds a large collection of Stevenson papers and Stevenson memorabilia. It features a bas relief depicting the author writing in bed, as seen in the pics. The second of the photos is Robert Louis Stevenson's Memorial in St Giles, Edinburgh.

[bunnyhugs22]

@baladbox "A Child’s View from Gaza" was an art exhibition showcasing drawings created by the children of Gaza (2008-09).

The pictures were drawn as part of an effort to help children deal with the horrors they had experienced. A Bay Area nonprofit, Middle East Children’s Alliance, arranged to display a collection of these pictures at the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California. However, under pressure from the Jewish Federation of the East Bay and other organizations, the museum backed out of the agreement at the last minute.