Please Join us for our Annual Meeting, Potluck and Historical Presentation

When it opened in 2010, the overall goal of the Oakland Museum of California’s history gallery, called Coming to California, was to provide a new type of public space within the Museum—an inclusive place of inquiry, reflection, and public conversation about the history of California, with room for ongoing contributions by OMCA’s communities over time. Many “permanent”

galleries can end up as static displays, designed to last for 10 to 20 years with little change. At OMCA, we took a different tack, with a design that acknowledges that the story of California is unfolding, and includes our visitors’ stories, as well as those who have come before us. The exhibition is a working prototype, designed to be easily changed, and with a number of participatory elements to reflect OMCA’s position as “the people’s museum.” In this talk, Louise Pubols, the Senior Curator of History and lead curator for the project, will reflect on how our communities participated in the creation of the gallery, and how visitors continue to shape its content.

Louise Pubols is Senior Curator of History at the Oakland Museum of California. At the Oakland Museum, her projects included a major reinstallation of the museum’s history galleries and a major exhibition on the environmental history of the San Francisco Bay, entitled Above and Below: Stories from Our Changing Bay.  Her recent book, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (Huntington Library Press and University of California Press, 2009), explores how patriarchy informed the economic and political systems of Mexican-era California.  It has won both the William P. Clements Prize for best non-fiction book on the Southwest from the Clements Center at SMU, and the Ray Allen Billington prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Please join us on Wednesday, May 7 for our Annual Meeting and this very interesting presentation. Feel free to call the History Room with your questions at (925) 283-4106 or send an email to Lafayette.history@comcast.net. Reservations also may be made below: