Projects

communal meal and conversation
April Ful's Night was an outdoor communal meal and conversation centered on Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and the subsequent uprisings throughout the Middle East. Over roasted goat and fava bean ful (Egypt's national dish, pronounced "fool"), we...
home movies on the big screen
Every year on Home Movie Day, amateur films are screened at over fifty venues around the world, including the Oakland Museum of California. Home Movie Day 2011 at OMCA included two components. First, home movies were submitted by the public, inspected by film...
four events that explore urban farming and celebrate agrarian culture
Seed Circus was a series of four summer events about how urban communities engage with the natural world. Each of the four events, held outdoors on Sunday afternoons, explored a different theme: Felt, Forage, Culture, and Seed. Seed Circus included craft demos, live...
symposium about engaging the public with online collections
In 2010, the Oakland Museum of California was gifted the All Of Us Or None collection, an archive of 24,000 political posters. The posters were collected by Michael Rossman, a Berkeley free-speech activist who dedicated his life to gathering and documenting...
Mark Dion at the Oakland Museum of California
On September 11, 2010, there was a conversation between two of America’s leading cultural figures, artist Mark Dion and writer Lawrence Weschler. Dion’s exhibition The Marvelous Museum: Orphans, Curiosities, and Treasures opened the night before at the Oakland...
online documentary about the OMCA Women's Board and their White Elephant Sale
The Oakland Standard approached two filmmakers, Les Blank and Courtney Stevens, and proposed an online documentary about the Oakland Museum Women's Board and their famous White Elephant Sale. The resultant film, White Gloves, is viewable in its entirety below. Scroll...
Here’s to the Oakland Standard! Clink.
On February 4, 2011, we launched the Oakland Standard with a late-night celebration at OMCA. It was a conversation, dance party, baby shower, and a toast to Oakland....
program about the contemporary back-to-the-land movement
On the evening of May 13, the Oakland Standard hosted Hay Fever, an event about Californians' relationship with the land. The concept for the event, and most of the presenters, hailed from Nevada City, California, an old mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills that...
knit graffiti installation
In August 2011, a prolific yarn bomber and fiber artist, Streetcolor, approached the Oakland Standard with a proposal to yarn bomb OMCA. Visitors often perceive the Museum's concrete edifice as unwelcoming or uninviting, so we were happy to support a handmade...
interactive installation by Jensen Architects
Oak Plaza, on Oak between Tenth and Eleventh Streets, is the threshold of the Oakland Museum of California. The Oakland Standard commissioned an architectural intervention to enhance this area, OMCA's main entrance, by making it a more dynamic, convivial, and flexible...
poster-printing workshop and discussion
On February 25, 2011, the Oakland Standard honored the history of political posters and the Museum’s acquisition of the All Of Us Or None (AOUON) collection with an evening of printmaking and conversation. The evening paid homage to the iconic images...
notes on the past, present, and future of Oakland and the East Bay by Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven
One of Oakland's many nicknames, "Bump City" was also the title of Tower of Power's second album (1972), and John Krich's 1979 book Bump City: Winners and Losers in Oakland, which featured photographs by Dorothea Lange from the collection of the Oakland Museum. Our...
graffiti mural
Living Concrete is a graffiti mural on OMCA's Oak Street Plaza. At a live event on January 21, 2012, Oakland graffiti artists Ras Terms, Safety First, Resta, and Tecka transformed what had been a five-hundred-square-foot blackboard (more info here) into a...
symposium about creating interdisciplinary museum content
On June 8, 2012, the Oakland Standard gathered cultural producers to speak with OMCA staff about creating interdisciplinary content. The earliest museums, called cabinets of curiosity or wunderkammer, existed before disciplinary boundaries were drawn and mingled objects...
video record of Occupy Oakland
Portraits from the Occupation is an artist project by Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven. The project comprises a series of video interviews with sixteen individuals involved with or impacted by Occupy Oakland. The interviews were recorded in March and April 2012...
short film about mundane moments at OMCA
Nothing Happens for Long is a collaborative short film project by Jonn Herschend and Andrew Leland, commissioned by the Oakland Standard at OMCA. The film presents interviews with real OMCA visitors describing their ordinary (even banal) experiences at the museum. These...
online travelogue
In conjunction with OMCA's exhibition A Walk in the Wild: Continuing John Muir’s Journey, the Oakland Standard asked artist and illustrator J. Otto Seibold to delve into his self-admitted Muir obsession. J. Otto grew up in Martinez, California, across the...
blog by our editor in residence, Andrew Leland
A blog documenting expeditions into California's social, cultural, and natural histories. Short multimedia essays explore the museum's inner workings along with the author's deepest emotions. Eminent Bay Area writers and artists make frequent guest appearances.
OMCA staff, past and present
So Many Dynamos is shorthand for the cast of dedicated characters who are employed by the Oakland Museum of California. This project is a tribute to OMCA staff, past and present. Between the art, science, and natural history departments, OMCA has a staff of about a...