Exhibitions & Galleries

Good Fire: Tending Native Lands explores how Native communities in Northern California have used controlled fire—also called “good fire” or “cultural burning”—to care for the land and sustain traditions for millennia. Organized in collaboration with Native California fire practitioners, artists, ecologists, and cultural leaders, the exhibition reframes fire not only as a destructive force, but as an essential tool for supporting healthy ecosystems and vibrant communities.

Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain navigates the braided histories of displacement, resistance, and resilience within Black American communities in Oakland and the East Bay. Through new commissions in art, architecture, and archival research, the exhibition traces how these communities have creatively resisted dispossession and reimagined spaces of home and belonging.

Students on Strike is a new installation opening in the OMCA Gallery of California History. The installation explores the enduring legacy of student activism at San Francisco State University by comparing the 1968-1969 student strike that established the nation’s first Black Studies Department and first College of Ethnic Studies to the recent campus protests against the war in Gaza. Through historical and contemporary posters and photographs, the intimate feature shows how students have consistently demanded justice and accountability from institutions, then and now. 

Fashion, family histories, and personal identity intersect in a new installation at OMCA by Bay Area artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong. Wong’s energetic and colorful paintings, drawn from both real-life events and her imagination, depict busy, rhythmic scenes of people going about their daily lives. For this project, Wong’s paintings take inspiration from dresses owned by seven 20th century Chinese American women, whose clothing and legacies live on in OMCA’s collection. Ancestral Visions features paintings along with a selection of the fashions that inspired them. Visitors to the installation are invited into the world of the dresses and the women who wore them to ponder history, the value of what we wear to future generations, and the role of clothing as an expression of identity. Dresses that belonged to Rose Setzo, Sophia Chang Wong, Grace Dea, Lei Kim Lim, Chop Chin Chum, and Sun Fung Lee Wong caught Wong’s eye and are re-envisioned in the abstract narratives of her vibrant work.

Experience the diverse voices of California’s Indigenous peoples as they shape the present and future through the lens of celebrated Indigenous photographer Dugan Aguilar.

OMCA’s latest exhibition, Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California offers guests a first look at a significant collection that highlights Indigenous endurance and explores the vivid tapestry of contemporary Indigenous California life.

Experience intergenerational, feminist, queer, and Xicanx-Indigenous artworks offering ancestral forms of liberation, healing, and being at Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples, only at OMCA.

Calli layers multiple artistic perspectives, featuring posters from late queer Chicana activist and professor Margaret “Margie” Terrazas Santos’ collection in conversation with contemporary works by Xicanx artists who expand the horizons of possibility, inspiring reflection and fostering dialogue about a world in which we can all belong.