A New Era of Collecting: OMCA’s Latest Installation, ‘Collecting a Moment’, Reflects California’s Evolving Culture and Activism
The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is excited to unveil its latest installation, Collecting a Moment, which showcases contemporary additions to the museum’s collection. This installation highlights a diverse range of works and objects that reflect the art, culture, and activism of our time. Featuring artists like Dalbert Castro, Katherine Sherwood, Katy Grannan, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Karen May, as well as powerful cultural artifacts, the installation invites visitors to engage with works that speak to social justice, personal history, and community resilience.
Collecting a Moment is reflective of OMCA’s approach to museum collecting, which aims to respond to timely issues while moving away from more traditional collecting practices. By focusing on contemporary voices and lived experiences, this new initiative offers a more inclusive and expansive narrative about art and culture in California.
Here’s a closer look at the incredible pieces now on view:
1. Tanya Aguiñiga – Museo Exclusion Exorcism (2022)
Mixed media textile with copal, prehnite, selenite, baking soda, washed and dried eggshells, rock salt, charcoal
Courtesy of Tanya Aguiñiga and Volume Gallery, Partial Gift, Purchased with Art Deaccession Funds
Tanya Aguiñiga’s Museo Exclusion Exorcism is a powerful textile installation that emerged from OMCA’s 2022 Hella Feminist exhibition about contemporary feminism. Aguiñiga invited womyn and femme artists to contribute objects and stories that are typically excluded from museum collections to construct this piece. The result is a poignant hanging textile in the shape of Coatlicue, the Mexica goddess of Earth, surrounded by a platform of minerals meant to purify and energize the space. Aguiñiga’s work serves as a declaration that personal, intimate, and spiritual experiences deserve to be recognized and preserved in the museum setting.
2. Katherine Sherwood – Olympia (2013)
Mixed media on canvas
Courtesy of Katherine Sherwood, Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, Gift of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park by exchange
Already a well-established painter, Katherine Sherwood was only 44 years old when she had a cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed the entire right side of her body. When she returned to painting, her life and art were completely transformed. Sherwood’s practice and identity as an artist were challenged and also invigorated by her identity and activism as a person with disabilities. She co-founded the Yelling Clinic, a disability art collective. She explains, “the name refutes the idea that anything having to do with disability should automatically be put into a medical framework. Being able to yell is being able to have a voice, what’s more, a voice that isn’t passive.”
Sherwood’s Olympia reimagines Édouard Manet’s iconic painting, Olympia (1863) with an image of her brain scan replacing the figure’s head, a halo of collaged neuro-anatomical illustrations, and a brace on the left leg mirroring her own brace. Olympia is the first painting in Sherwood’s series Venuses of the Yelling Clinic, 2013–2022. Each work in the series appropriates the image of a nude woman from Western art history, and is painted on the back of reproductions once used by the UC Berkeley art department.
3. Costume and Shoes Worn by Dancer Fei Ying (1943)
Gift of JoAnna Watson-Wong
Mary Young (1920–2014) was born in Hanford and raised in Visalia, California. She transgressed the cultural and gender expectations of her day to forge a career as a dancer in 1940s Chinese American nightclubs in the Bay Area and throughout the West Coast and Pacific Northwest. The network of nightclubs owned and operated by Asian Americans was known as the “Chop Suey Circuit” of the late 1930s-50s. The clubs featured Asian American performers who played for a primarily white audience. A Bay Area phenomenon that spread throughout the United States, the clubs simultaneously reinforced and upended racist stereotypes. Young went by Fei Ying as a performer and was known for her acrobatic style and signature performance to the tune of Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. The image shows her wearing this costume and shoes in 1943 while performing at Fong Wan’s New Shanghai Terrace Bowl in Oakland.
4. Katy Grannan – Anonymous, Bakersfield, CA (2011)
Pigment print
Gift of Frisch Brandt and August Fischer
This photograph is part of Katy Grannan’s series The 99, which refers to California State Route 99, the Central Valley highway that connects Sacramento to Los Angeles, passing through some of the state’s most economically depressed communities.
Grannan spent three years working on the series, photographing the people she met on the streets of small-town California. In these portraits, Grannan uses low-angle photography, the stark light of midday, and decontextualized backgrounds to present her subjects with a sense of power and authority.
5. Megaphone and Facemask Used by Activist Cat Brooks (2020)
Plastic and mixed materials
Courtesy of Cat Brooks, Acquisition funded with gifts by exchange
As an activist, organizer, and co-founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP), Cat Brooks has been a leading voice in the movement for racial justice and against police brutality. These objects—a megaphone used in protests and a facemask representing collective action—are powerful symbols of Brooks’ work advocating for criminal justice reform and community safety. The megaphone represents the amplification of voices fighting for change, while the facemask reflects the need for protection and care in the face of violence.
6. Dalbert Castro – Spirit Birdman (1978)
Oil on canvas
Gift of the Aeschliman-McGreal Collection
Dalbert Castro (Nisenan) was born near the ancient village of Holakeu, Auburn, Placer County, California. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he was recognized as both a contemporary artist and an interpreter of Nisenan mythology and the history of the Sacramento Valley and surrounding foothills.
Spirit Birdman is a stunning example of his ability to blend mythological imagery with a deep understanding of nature and the environment. This painting portrays a spirit who returns to the world as a mockingbird and an acorn grinding rock overgrown with grass, reminding us of the interconnectedness of animals, nature, and the spirit world.
7. Karen May – Untitled (Eight Artworks) (2016–2018)
Mixed media on found magazine page
Courtesy of the artist and NIAD Art Center
Karen May is a multimedia artist with a longtime practice at NIAD Art Center, a progressive studio for artists with developmental disabilities in Richmond, California. These drawings on Art Forum magazine advertisement pages are part of an ongoing series. Since 1962 the magazine has maintained a distinctive 10.5” square format, which is instantly recognizable to many people who follow art-related journalism. By working with a format and context traditionally reserved for elite artists, May challenges the boundaries of who gets to participate in the art world, asserting her place in this conversation as an artist with developmental disabilities.
Collecting a Moment offers a rich and diverse array of artworks and cultural artifacts that invite viewers to reflect on contemporary life through the lenses of identity, activism, history, and personal experience. By broadening the scope of what museums collect and display, OMCA continues to make space for diverse voices and untold stories in the ongoing conversation about the art and culture of California.
Collecting a Moment is included with regular Museum admission. For tickets and information, visit www.museumca.org.
#OMCA #CollectingaMoment
More FROM OUR GALLERY
