West by Midwest

Oakland

decade


1950s

1955

Billy Al Bengston moves to Oakland and enrolls at the California College of Arts and Crafts but moves back to Los Angeles within the year.

decade


1960s

1969

Barbara Kasten transfers to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

decade


1970s

1970

The Oakland Museum of California organizes Tom Marioni’s first museum exhibition, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art. For the exhibition, Marioni invites 16 friends to the museum on a Monday (when it is normally closed) and leaves the detritus for the installation. The work, which is an example of social sculpture, has been repeated in institutions all over the world.

1971–73 1971

Bruce Conner uses the Dennis Hopper collages as source material for a series of photo etchings produced at Crown Point Press in Oakland, with founding Director Kathan Brown. They are published in three volumes as The Dennis Hopper One Man Show. Conner originally proposed the collages for an exhibition of the same name at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1967, but Wilder rejected the proposal given the false attribution.

1974

The Oakland Museum of California commissions A Butterfly for Oakland, one of Judy Chicago’s Atmosphere works.

1978–79 1978

The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, organizes the exhibition Billy Al Bengston: Paintings of Three Decades, which travels to the Oakland Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

decade


2010s

2014

Judy Chicago has a solo exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California titled Judy Chicago: A Butterfly for Oakland.

2016

Emory Douglas is included in the group exhibition All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 at the Oakland Museum of California.

2017

Roy De Forest has a solo exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California titled Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest.

Related tags


Billy Al Bengston Judy Chicago Bruce Conner Roy De Forest Emory Douglas Dennis Hopper Barbara Kasten Tom Marioni California California College of Arts Chicago Illinois LACMA La Cienega Los Angeles Nicholas Wilder Gallery Oakland Museum of California The Black Panther Party