Oakland Museum of California

The Oakland Museum of California will digitize approximately 2,000 images from a recently acquired photography collection of contemporary Native life spanning from the 1980s-2018. The Dugan Aguilar Collection and Archive provides a window into the lives of California’s Indigenous peoples, telling a story of revitalization and renewal by capturing traditional lifeways in a contemporary context. The museum will collaborate with a group of Native community members to ensure the Native Californian perspective is instrumental in the care, use, documentation, and access to the collection. In addition to the digitization, museum staff will catalog the collection, rehouse it in a climate-controlled storage area, and develop a proposal to exhibit the collection within the next few years. This project will make these images available to the public for the first time through the museum’s website and an online searchable database.