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Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of America

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  • CAL CONVERSATIONS

    LANDS OF PROMISE AND PERIL:
    GEOGRAPHIES OF CALIFORNIA

    California is an elusive dream but also a cruel illusion. It is both the "Golden State" and the "Plundered Province,"" a place of beauty and brutality, sanctuary and exclusion. Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of California explores the material places and social spaces that have created both astonishing prosperity and intractable inequality in the state. It focuses on the peculiarities of place and the experiences of ordinary people, while also considering how broader forces-environmental preservation and degradation, industrial innovation and exploitation, urban expansion and segregation, and cultural activism and oppression-shape opportunities and injustices in everyday life.
    Organized by UC Berkeley students, Lands of Promise and Peril depicts 180 years of continuity and change in California with paintings, photographs, maps, works on paper, and sculpture drawn from the BAMPFA collection and the Bancroft Library. Works by Pirkle Jones, Dorothea Lange, Joanne Leonard, Chiura Obata, Brian D. Tripp, and others represent the diversity of California, but also raise questions about what is absent or invisible in the museum collection. Rather than focusing solely on individual artists, however, the exhibition is structured by themes in environmental, economic, urban, and cultural geography.
    The theme of migration, the lifeblood of the state, also flows through the exhibition, foregrounding both the creation and contestation of racialized injustices. In this way, the exhibition honors California's greatest promise—the capacity to challenge inequalities— and encourages us to contemplate the state of our future.

  • Contributors from left to right, Front Row: Noor Ali, Lillias Arvanites, Luz Mendez, Kate Gabon, Aidan Barry-Owen, Middle Row: Joseph Chang, Joss Harrison, Aylin Figueroa Uribe, Mohini Rye, Back Row: Seth Lunine, Jocelyn Gama, Paul O'Neill, Shuge Luo

    Cal Conversations/Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of California is organized in conjunction with Dr. Seth Lunine's UC Berkeley course Geography 50AC: California, by students Noor Ali, Lillias Arvanites, Aidan Barry-Owen, Joseph Chang, Kate Gabon, Jocelyn Gama, Joss Harrison, Shuge Luo, Luz Mendez, Paul O'Neill, Mohini Rye, and Aylin Figueroa Uribe. The project relied on guidance from BAMPFA Associate Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and support from Geography PhD candidate Xander Lene. This is the fourth in a series of annual exhibitions developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley classes.

  • Nature: Edges and Interactions



    Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang.

    — William Cronon

    Wilderness is not a place but a malleable idea, and changing cultural understandings of nature have engendered profound, often violent, transformations in California. Depictions of both spectacular vistas and deplorable destruction reveal the complex relationship between humans and nature. The works in this section point to the people and practices behind environmental transformation, as well as processes of erasure. Today we can no longer deny the savagery of land-taking, the profligacy of industry, or the futility of attempts to master nature-but neither can we ignore the need for human interventions to save California for future generations."

  • Yosemite Valley, California: The Bridal Veil Fall, Francis Florabond [Fanny] Palmer,for Currier & Ives (Great Britain, 1812–1876); 1866; Lithograph (reproduction); Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

    Ahwahnechee ["Yosemite Valley People"] occupy the foreground of Palmer's lithograph. Their conic o'-chums [housing structures] mimic the mountain peaks in the background, figuratively embedding Native Californians in primeval nature. The western frontier drew ideological divisions between civilization and wilderness, Christianity and savagery, and industriousness and indolence. Perceptions of Native Californians as inherently inferior and barriers to "progress" justified displacement, subordination, and violence as not only natural but inevitable. Palmer's tranquil scene belies California Governor Peter Burnett's warning in 1851, "that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct." State militias raided, looted, and razed Ahwahnechee villages well before Currier & Ives published this work in 1866.

  • Yosemite Winter Scene, Albert Bierstadt (United States, born in Germany 1830–1902), 1872; Oil on Canvas; Gift of Henry D. Bacon, 1881.4

    Bierstadt's commercial artwork helped elevate Yosemite as the foremost scenic attraction in California, a western analogue of Niagara Falls, if not the European Alps. The tint of gold behind wafting winter clouds hints at the promise of California, beckoning settlement and "civilization." Bierstadt omitted Native Californians from Yosemite Valley, creating an image of pristine, untouched wilderness. But Native Californians had fundamentally altered this landscape well before European contact. Controlled burning, seed scattering, and other human practices that mimicked natural processes had enhanced biodiversity throughout California for millennia before Bierstadt painted this work. Survival was predicated on sustainability. Native Californians' intentional interventions remind us just how invented California's wilderness actually is.

  • Untitled (couple in meadow below Half Dome), Bill Owens (US, born 1938), c. 1970-73; Gelatin silver print; BAMPFA, Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner, 2005.27.20

    Bill Owens is a photojournalist best known for his depictions of Bay Area metropolitan life. This photograph of two people leisurely experiencing the majesty of Yosemite contrasts cities and nature. Here Owens depicts nature as a sanctuary. The image raises questions about the very existence of wilderness and what it means to us today. Can we separate humans and nature in thought, practice, or policy? In light of climate change, how does the way we think about the role of nature in our lives change the way we behave?

  • Ruin of Old Tioga Mine, Tioga, High Sierra, Calif., U.S.A., Chiura Obata (US, born Japan 1885–1975), From World Landscape Series—America; 1930; Color Woodblock print; University of California, Berkeley

    Obata's woodblock print laments the consequences of plunder. "Bare of all trees, the copper-colored mountains bows its head," he wrote in an epitaph for the scene. Miners, financiers, and industrialists stalked, staked, and claimed nature to callously extract value from the earth. Mines voraciously consumed forests and rivers to deepen extraction enterprises. Hydraulic mines dumped billions of cubic yards of debris into the Sacramento River system by the early 1880s, while mines on the Comstock Lode "lost" thousands of tons of mercury in Sierran watersheds. The environmental scars depicted by Obata paralleled the social fractures caused by Japanese internment during World War II, which left Obata's successful career as an artist and instructor at UC Berkeley in temporary ruins.

  • Diseño del Rancho San Antonio: Alameda County, Calif., c. 1840s; Pen and ink on tracing paper (reproduction); Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of Califoria, Berkeley

    This diseño ["rough map"] and the map of the ranchos of Vicente and Domingo Peralta at right both represent the land you are standing on now. Despite different representations of the natural landscape, both show processes of dispossession and the transformation of nature into property. The diseño depicts a portion of the Peralta family's Rancho San Antonio, one of the last of thirty land grants conveyed by the Spanish crown before 1821. It depicts trees, marshes, and other natural elements; Codornices and Temescal Creeks impose property boundaries on a portion of the former territory of the Huichin group of Ohlone Indians. This sketch map, and the land grants it represents, served colonial aspirations, above all Alta California's integration into global trading networks.

  • Map of the ranchos of Vicente and Domingo Peralta, Surveyed by Julius G. Kellersberger (US, born Switzerland, 1821–1900), 1857; Ink on paper (reproduction); Courtesy of the Earth Sciences & Map Library, University of California, Berkeley

    California Surveyor-General Jack Hayes led a coalition of San Francisco investors who, through acquisitions and litigation, acquired nearly all of the Peraltas· property north of Lake Merritt in 1855. Julius Kellersberger, who had previously served as Hayes's deputy surveyor, mapped the land. With meticulous surveying and precise subdivisions, Kellersberger imposed a new system of private property on the former rancho. The assignment of tracts in 1856 translated the interest shares of each investor into actual property [ninety-six tracts, ranging from twelve to 330 acres apiece]. Kellersberger's map envisions the inception of metropolitan Oakland and embodies pervasive themes in California's urban development: the use of public power to enhance private profit and the formative role of speculative real estate development.

  • Untitled (OF 104-91: Swimming Pool), Richard Misrach (US, born 1949); 1991; From 1991: The Oakland–Berkeley Fire Aftermath; Archival pigment print; Gift of the artist, 2011.1.3

    Photographer Richard Misrach documented the aftermath of the 1991 Berkeley-Oakland Firestorm that killed twenty-five people, injured 150 others, and destroyed nearly three thousand houses and 1,520 acres. The image is a poignant reminder of our vulnerability, of promise and peril. The photograph also raises questions about the nature of so-called "natural disasters," especially considering the propensity for wildfires in the East Bay Hills. As writer Mike Davis asserts, "market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense."

  • San Luis Drain, Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, California, Robert Dawson (US, born 1950); 1985 (printed 1987); From the Great Central Valley Project; Gelatin silver print; Gift of the artist, 1999.6.5

    The US Bureau of Reclamation designed the San Luis Drain in the 1960s as a solution to the disposal of toxic agricultural wastewater in the western San Joaquin Valley. Politics and lack of funding stalled its completion, leaving the terminus in Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge. In 1985 photographer Robert Dawson documented the terminus of the drain, where scientists linked alarming rates of waterfowl deaths and deformities to toxic concentrations of selenium and other trace elements in pooled water. The drainage project remains in limbo, pitting environmentalists and water districts against growers concerned with sustaining agriculture in the valley. The San Luis Drain points to the political and practical intricacies of preservation, as well as the significance of interactions between humans and nature.

  • Industry: Innovation and Exploitation

     

    "Why was California such an astonishing success? Plundered it was but it grew fabulously for all that"

    — Richard Walker



    How did the voracious exploitation of natural resources generate enduring growth in the state? The wealth of nature did not preordain California's remarkable economic success but it did spark a succession of dynamic industries, from mechanized mining in the Sierra Nevada in the 1850s to the Silicon Valley tech boom today. These glittering symbols of California's economy, however, are tarnished by intertwined histories of cultural domination and economic exploitation. Perhaps nowhere else in the US has the gap between rich and poor widened more cruelly. The artworks in this section illustrate that these contradictions are not simply unintended consequences but are embedded in the very logic of California's astonishing success.

  • Left: Slate Bluff Mining Company, Charles Elveena (US, born c. 1832–1885); 1869; Watercolor on paper, Gift of Bliss Carnochan and Nancy Edebo, 1995.16

    Right: La Ruee vers l'or (The Gold Rush), Leo Keuper (France, born 1926); 1969; Offset lithograph (movie poster), Beqeuest of Melvin Novikoff, 1987.16.7

    This pairing contrasts California myths and realities. Kouper's movie poster celebrates the triumph of ordinary men on a heroic quest for gold and glory, giving meaning to the California dream. The film depicts the Klondike gold rush, but Chaplin drew heavily on Californian mythology for the story of striking it rich through pure luck. Wage laborers replace independent miners in Elveena's depiction of the Slate Bluff Mining Company. The watercolor shows the flumes and water-powered machinery required for the expanding scale of California gold mining. A dog pulls on a Chinese man's queue and Native Californians, shown with baskets and bare chests, are presented as observers, unfit to work at the mine. Such depictions created and perpetuated stereotypes of inferior and unproductive nonwhite workers, who were undeserving of California's riches.

  • Tomato Picker, Coachella Valley, Dorothea Lange (US, 1895–1965), 1935; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Michael and Gabrielle Boyd, 1996.47.4

    Since the 1850s, backbreaking migrant labor has enabled the productivity and profitability of California agribusiness, which remains among the state's chief industries. Taken in the midst of the Great Depression, Lange's Tomato Picker, Coachella Valley unveils both the plight and power of agricultural workers, who toiled without basic labor protections. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act guaranteed private sector workers' rights to unionize but specifically excluded agriculture, where migrant workers continued to pick and pack for dwindling wages, while remaining largely invisible to consumers.

  • Grape Picker, Berryessa Valley, Pirkle Jones (US 1917–2009), 1956 (printed 1968); Selenium toned gelatin silver print; Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2012.35.15

    Created in 1942 to fulfill a putative labor shortage, the federal Bracero Program brought Mexican workers, or braceros (literally "one who uses his arms"). to toil in the fields of the American west, unprotected by basic labor rights. In Grape Picker, Berryessa Valley, the upward tilt of Jones's camera focuses on an unidentified bracero, who proudly fills the frame. Although taken before the Bracero Program ended in 1964, the photograph circulated widely during the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike led by the United Farm Workers, whose multiethnic, nonviolent protests finally forced growers to sign union contracts, increase pay, and improve working conditions. The movement, however, waned. Today, increasingly vulnerable agricultural workers grapple with poverty and food insecurity in one of the most prosperous agricultural regions on earth.

  • Left: Man walking against the wind, San Francisco, Pirkle Jones, 1956 (printed 1960); Selenium toned gelatin silver print; Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2012.35.2

    Right: White Angel Breadline, San Francisco; Dorothea Lange, 1933; Gelatin Silver Print; Gift of Jan Leonard and Jerrold A. Peil, 2002.43.59

    While both of these photographs were shot in San Francisco, they depict two sides of California. "I saw something, and I encompassed it, and I had it," is how Lange described White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, the first photograph she took for a project to memorialize street life during the Great Depression. The photograph reveals a listless character, his face and individuality obscured. What Lange truly "encompassed" was the pain and desperation of the nation's working class. Jones presents the brighter side of life in San Francisco two decades later. Yet Jones's focus on the powerful, bustling businessman raises questions about who was left behind during the booming 1950s.

  • Left: Car Dump in Emeryville, California, Lewis Callaghan (US, 1904–1987), 1968; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Mrs. Lewis S. Callaghan, 1995.29.150

    Right: Torchbearer; John Haley (US, 1905–1991), 1930–37; Lithograph; WPA Federal Art Project: transferred from UC Berkeley Art Department, 1943.12

    Haley's welder illuminates a stunning moment during the New Deal, when the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project embraced the dignity and strength of labor, as well as the possibilities of a nation united in the service of the public good rather than private interest. Callaghan's Car Dump in Emeryville, California depicts a moment when this grand vision of industry and labor in California dimmed. The auto recycling plant in the photograph replaced a steel mill, in keeping with the broader trend of low-paying service sector jobs supplanting unionized labor.

  • San Juan Capistrano, Edward Borein (US, 1872–1945), c. 1923; Etching; University of California, Berkeley

    Racialized mass incarceration and penal servitude are integral to California's historical geography, though the logic of incarceration extends beyond prison walls. Borein's illustration of peaceful interactions between Franciscans and Native Californians romanticizes Mission San Juan Capistrano and perpetuates the "mission myth." Spanish recruitment, capture, confinement, regimentation, surveillance, restraint, and corporal punishment of indigenous people created California's first system of incarceration. Spiritual conquest entailed forced acculturation and rigorous, often deadly, work discipline in a wrenching process of "civilizing" Native Americans by transforming them into useful Catholic workers and redeemable Spanish subjects.

  • Untitled (Violations), Dennis Oppenheim (US, 1938–2011), c. 1971; Black-and-white photograph; Gift of the Naify Family, 1995.46.440.3

    When photographer Dennis Oppenheim took this photograph in 1971, prisoners worked in San Quentin Prison's clothing and furniture factories, a system intended to generate commodities while producing rehabilitated citizens. Oppenheim stole the 103 hubcaps displayed in the picture, an act he described as "fracturing" the law, rather than breaking it. This distinction raises the question of who has the power to thwart, bend, or divert our legal system. Today nearly one-third of California's adult male prisoners are African American, despite comprising only 6 percent of the state's population. Similarly, a Latino man is three times more likely to be incarcerated in California than a white man.

  • Underground Arsenal, Arthur Tress (US, born 1940), 1992; Vintage Cibachrome print; Gift of Steven (class of 1978), Quynh, Jared, A.J., and Juliet Spite, 2009.45.30

    Santa Clara Valley became a center for the aerospace industry in the 1930s, resulting in a concentration of scientists and researchers who developed early communications technology. This aided in the invention of the Internet, a Department of Defense project that became a major economic engine for the state. Tress's Underground Arsenal, a photographic print of a tightly layered collage, explores the social and political implications of this technological innovation. The juxtaposition of the text "Communications for Defense" with the Bell Systems Pacific Telephone logo links private industry to military technology, an essential relationship in the origins of Silicon Valley. The economic and cultural implications of this relationship, however, are hidden underneath dreamlike scenes of California life.

  • Untitled (Man in laboratory), Bill Owens, c. 1970s; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner, 2001.26.7

    Owens captures a view of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during a formative period of innovation in California. The lab's close affiliation with UC Berkeley facilitated numerous contributions to defense, medical, and computer technologies. Although federally funded, the lab fostered private industry through the development of high performance computing and numerous types of computer chips. This photograph raises questions about why subsequent "tech booms" have amassed incredible wealth in the hands of the few in California. Why has information technology failed to elevate material conditions for the masses? Why do entrenched ethnic and gender disparities persist in Silicon Valley's workforce?

  • Cities: Expansion and Exclusion

     

    "Where you are becomes who you are, becomes how you are (under)classified."

    — Allen Pred

    Social constructions of race are inseparable from physical constructions of place. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in the expanding metropolis of postwar California, where one group's privileged position relied on opportunities denied to others. Photographs by Joanne Leonard and Bill Owens show disparities perpetuated by federal redlining policies that funneled resources to predominantly white homeowners in the suburbs at the expense of increasingly African American central cities. More recent works in this section address the spatial reshuffling of poverty and privilege, as gentrification disproportionately displaces working-class people of color. In all, the works in this section raise questions about power, privilege, and who has the right to live, or even exist, in our cities.

  • Left: "It's hard to hunt because you're always trespassing all the housing developments which are taking over the empty fields", Bill Owens; 1971 (printed 1998); From Suburbia; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner; 2012.55.2

    Right: Man Standing with Flag, Joanne Leonard (US, born 1940); 1965; Gelatin silver print; Gift of the artist, 2017.77.45

    Suburban sprawl changed the character of the rural landscape so swiftly that residents, such as the Livermore men in Owens's photograph, struggled to adjust. Yet the guns in this image, when contrasted with the American flag in Leonard's West Oakland photograph, question the relationship between place and privilege, and the meaning of citizenship. The Mulford Act, signed by California governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, repealed a state law allowing people to carry loaded firearms in public. Oakland Assemblyman Don Mulford crafted the bill to stop members of the Black Panther Party from conducting armed patrols, known as "copwatching," that combated police brutality in West Oakland neighborhoods.

  • Left: Untitled (6 women, one with "Keep Off Grass" Sign), Bill Owens; c. 1970–73 (printed 1998); Gelatin silver print; Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner; 2005.27.21

    Right: Three Men on Mr. Piper's Porch, Joanne Leonard; 1965; Gelatin silver print; Gift of the artist, 2017.77.12

    The "keep off grass" sign documented by Owens in this photograph invites multiple interpretations. When paired with Leonard's photograph, taken in West Oakland, it engenders concerns about exclusion, segregation, and the development of suburbs like Livermore. What are the consequences for people forced to "keep off grass"? Or for people who refuse to do so? Leonard's work shows an everyday scene in 1960s Oakland, men relaxing on Mr. Piper's front porch. This scene suggests ways that black residents created spaces of autonomy and community power in an increasingly segregated metropolis.

  • Left: A Mile a Minute (LA to Del Mar as Seen from a Moving Train), Kim Abeles (US, born 1952); 1986; Ink on Paper; Gift of Art Resources Transfer, Inc., 2004.12

    Right: Oblivion 7N, David Maisel (US, born 1961); 2004; Inkjet Print; Gift of Victoria Belco and William Goodman in memory of Teresa Goodman, 2018.46.36

    Abeles developed this graphic meditation on the complex relationships among space, time, and narrative while riding on an Amtrak train from Los Angeles to Del Mar. Highways create structure and boundaries in Maisel's otherwise blurry and limitless depiction of metropolitan Los Angeles. We typically perceive urban and regional transportation systems simply as a means of movement and assume that timing and convenience determine riders' choices. Yet Abeles's observant work, in conjunction with the dystopic tilt of Maisel's photograph, raises questions about the political underpinnings of mobility and physical infrastructure. Who has the money, time, and freedom to move unfettered through the metropolis? Why do freeways dissect Boyle Heights but skirt Beverly Hills?

  • They think they own the place, Brian D. Tripp (US, born 1945); 1992; From News from Native California; Mixed media; Gift of the artist, 1992.50.1

    Tripp's mixture of mediums and use of contrasting colors, as well as geometries influenced by his hometown, Eureka, reference his Karuk ancestry and activism in the Humboldt County indigenous community. The metallic gold-and-silver dollar signs represent the value of land—California's most coveted asset—and question historical geographies of dispossession in California. This provocative work asks how power, privilege, and entitlement continue to perpetuate inequality throughout the state, especially considering contemporary gentrification and the unprecedented displacement of working-class people of color from California cities.

  • Peaks and Valleys Maquette, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, 1991; Model house and paint; Gift of Themistocles and Dare Michos; 1993.58

    Ericson and Ziegler listed the name of every street in San Francisco on the shingles composing the roof of this model house. They sought to stimulate conversation about the topographical uniqueness and social diversity of the city. Considering that San Francisco's black population has plummeted by almost 50 percent over the past three decades, the sculpture questions the meaning of home. Who has the privilege of living in San Francisco? Who is entitled to the security and dignity of shelter?

  • People: Invention and Intervention

     

    "Lacking any clear 'objective' criteria other than phenotype and ancestry, conflict over the racial designation of groups in California devolved into questions over which group had enough power and influence to enact its interests."

    — Tomás Almaguer

    From the Gold Rush to the Great Migration to more recent waves from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and beyond, migration is the source of California's vitality. Unlike the black/white binary that largely informs our understanding of the history of race relations in the US, multiple groups both created and challenged California's unequal social relations. The works in this section don't merely reflect the state's diverse and divisive social and political life— they helped create it. They explore the historical contingencies and contemporary contexts that define race and difference in California, as well as struggles for social justice in its many guises.

    • Chinatown Children, Arnold Genthe (US, born Germany, 1869–1942); c. 1895–1906; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Jan Leonard and Jerrold A. Peil, 2000.50.18

    Who has the power to name, classify, subordinate, or exclude? Genthe described his own "strange enchantment" with Chinatown, a perspective he captured by surreptitiously photographing ordinary experiences, such as these children at play. Their clothing and hairstyles denote difference in an era of virulent xenophobia just a decade after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Genthe cropped his photos to exclude "American" elements, fabricating an "exotic" terrain in the heart of San Francisco. Is Genthe's picture a product of intimacy or invasion, of authenticity or invention? Is the representation a means of cultural translation or racial subordination?

  • Left: Young Girl with Hat, Ruth-Marion Baruch (US, born Germany, 1922–1997); 1961; From the series Illusion for Sale, San Francisco; Gelatin silver print, Gift of the Prikle Jones Foundation, 2012.35.44

    Right: A woman in a fur coat passes a billboard image of Hollywood star Lana Turner, Jack Birns (US, born 1919–2008); 1948; From the series Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution; Gelatin silver print; Transfer from the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, 2004.39.2

    In Birns's photograph, a woman in a fur coat strolls past a giant soap advertisement in Shanghai featuring Hollywood star Lana Turner. The image was taken on the eve of the violent upheaval of the Communist Revolution that would forever transform China. Such a billboard was not an unusual sight in cosmopolitan Shanghai. It reveals Hollywood imagery as an agent of American cultural imperi­alism, projecting idealized conceptions of beauty, femininity, and whiteness. While Birns's photograph suggests how Hollywood produced California fantasies, Baruch's candid portrait of a young woman in a San Francisco department store shows how unattainable illusions are not only for sale but often internalized through consumption.

  • Left: Silver Screen, Dennis Feldman (US, 1946); c. 1978 (first printing 2018); From Looking at the Stars; Gelatin silver print, Gift of the artist, 2018.76.15

    Right: Young boy wearing mask, Joanne Leonard; 1967; Gelatin silver print; Gift of the artist, 2017.77.7

    Feldman's silhouette and Leonard's mask unveil our assumptions. The iconic figure of Marilyn Monroe, watched by many on the silver screen, registers instantly. The boy wearing a mask is seen by few and his identity remains a mystery. Would he appear familiar if Leonard had shown his face? Would unmasking him resolve issues of anonymity? How does the spectacular life of Hollywood relate to the everyday existence of most Californians?

  • Left: Untitled (police officers eating lunch), Bill Owens; c. 1975; From the series Temporary Organizations; Gelatin silver print, Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner, 2005.27.21

    Right: Plate glass window of the Black Panther Party National Headquarters, the morning it was shattered by the bullets of two Oakland policemen, Pirkle Jones; September 10, 1968 (printed in 2010); From A Photo Essay on the Black PanthersGelatin silver print; Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2012.35.23

    Owens's portrait of two Livermore police officers eating lunch presents an everyday scene that might connote safety. But juxtaposed with Jones's photograph of the windows of the Black Panther Party headquarters shattered by police bullets, the image leads us to question the meaning of "to protect and serve." Oakland police surveilled, stalked, and attacked members of the Black Panther Party. During the last of the numerous traffic stops of Huey Newton, a verbal altercation escalated into a shootout that left Newton wounded and an Oakland police officer dead. Outraged by Newton's conviction on a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, two Oakland policemen shot up the front window of the party headquarters, where a poster of Newton hung. They ritualistically killed his effigy but failed to diminish the power of the portrait.

  • Black Panthers from Sacramento, Free Huey Rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA , Pirkle Jones, Aug 25, 1965 (printed 2010); From A Photo Essay on the Black Panthers; Gelatin silver print; Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation; 2012.35.28

    Jones's focus on women complicates common perceptions of the Black Panther Party. Although Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were the best-known members of the Panthers, the photograph depicts the essential role of women in the creation, expansion, and leadership of the movement. Street bravado and militant self-defense defined the party in the popular imagination, but the Panthers' "practical revolutionary activity" combated the social violence inflicted by the government's failure to redress poverty, hunger, and inadequate housing. The Panthers' Free Breakfast Programs, Liberation Schools, and array of community-based programs providing free medical care, senior services, and housing gave true meaning to the slogan, "all power to the people."

  • Left: Hippies sitting on a car, San Francisco, Ruth-Marion Baroch; 1967; From the series Haight Ashbury; Gelatin silver print, Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2012.35.49

    Right: Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys, LA, July 1982, Glen E. Friedman (US, born 1962); 1982; Black-and-white photograph; Purchase made possible through a gift of The Buddy Taub Foundation, Dennis A. Roach and Jill Roach, Directors; 2010.60.5

    These images of two countercultural movements contrast peace and love with frustration and fury. Baruch documents the inclusivity of the hippies, who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out during the Summer of Love. Friedman captures the aggression of Jello Biafra, frontman of San Francisco punk pioneers the Dead Kennedys. In contrast to the seeming community atmosphere in Haight Ashbury, Friedman shows a hypermasculine realm of alienation and anger. Both images articulate discontent and rebellion, issuing challenges that registered deeply in the mainstream psyche. Yet both movements drew young people largely from the white middle class. Questions remain about power and impunity, especially considering the oppression of other social movements, including the West Coast hip-hop culture featured in Friedman's other work.

  • Left: Matt and Joe, Catherin Opie; 1993; Type C print, Gift of Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser, 2004.23.5

    Right: Irrigation Ditch Bath, Guatalope, CA, Arthur Tress; 1997; Gelatin silver print; Gift of Steven (class of 1978), Quynh, Jared, A. J., and Juliet Spile, 2009.45.10

    These two unconventional portraits raise questions about private life and public representation. Sitting down for Opie's photograph in 1993 was equivalent to "standing up" during an era of homophobia amplified by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Opie captured the humanity of Matt and Joe and documented a political movement. Tress's photograph both defies and perpetuates stereotypes. The intimate, perhaps unexpected, image of power and autonomy humanizes the worker by showing him during a brief respite. But he is depicted as an agricultural worker nevertheless. Why are Latinx people shown mostly in this context in the artworks in the museum collection? How can we accurately represent the diversity of the Latinx experience in California, especially during our present moment of peril and possibility?