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.

This selection of new additions to the OMCA collection highlights the art and culture of the moment and illuminates history in the making. The works in the installation are the result of OMCA’s new collecting process that seeks to respond to timely issues that impact the communities of Oakland and California. Representing a move away from more traditional museum collecting priorities, Collecting the Moment shows some of the ways we center our institutional relationships with diverse community groups and voices. This ongoing and changing installation will reveal some of the many ways California artists, activists, and others claim cultural space, question societal norms, gain power, and engage the larger questions of our time.