LaborFest

4 days ago

Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese American incarceration are turned immersive at OMCA
www.berkeleyside.org/2026/10/01/behere-1942-japanese-american-incarceration-oakland-omca-masaki-f…
Some 1,800 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from Oakland to camps in 1942. In a new exhibit, artist Masaki Fujihata explores the Berkeley photographer’s iconic images of those events through augmented reality.
By Momo Chang
Oct. 1, 2026, 8:00 a.m.

Artist Masaki Fujihata holds a tablet used in his augmented reality exhibition "BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration" which opened at Oakland Museum of California, September 18, 2026. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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In the striking photograph, a young Japanese American girl is dressed in a plaid peacoat and round hat, her face wearing a pleasant expression that could read as a smile.

She and her mother are also wearing paper tags dangling from a string on their lapels, like they are pieces of cargo.

The photo, taken by Dorothea Lange in Hayward of a young Mae Yanagi and her family, captures the moment just before she and her family boarded a bus in May 1942 to be relocated to a concentration camp. The lives of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and, two months later, issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing their roundup and detention.

The image is one of several in the archives of Lange, a longtime Berkeley resident, and another photographer, Russell Lee, that captured the attention of Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata. These images form the raw material for an immersive augmented reality exhibit that opened Sept. 18 at the Oakland Museum of California, titled “BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration.”

Fujihata enlarges the iconic photograph of Yanagi until her eyes take up an entire wall at the entrance of the exhibit. The closeup allows visitors to notice the reflection in her eyes, which appears to show the shadowy figures of several people. One is likely Lange, the photographer. Fujihata suspects the others are government officials and maybe military police, and for him it opened up a new interpretation of Yanagi’s expression. In fact, he notes, her eyes are not smiling at all. “Photography contains the story behind the surface,” he said.

Fujihata stands in front an enlarged detail of Dorothea Lange’s photo of Mae Yanagi and her family just before their forced relocation to prison camps at the entrance to “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” at OMCA. The ghostly reflections of officers or photographers are visible in her eyes. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
The exhibit, open through Dec. 27, uses photos from Lange and Lee that they took under the auspices of the government agency that supervised the roundups, the War Relocation Authority. Several of them were taken in Oakland. Using AR, a visitor can experience the moments just before hundreds of families were taken away to camps.

“This is our first contemporary art exhibition focused on this story,” said Carin Adams, senior art curator at OMCA, which holds Lange’s archives. “It’s the most complex, mediawise, that we have attempted.”

Reporting to 1117 Oak St.

The 1930s was the peak of social documentary photography, with Lange as one of its most famous practitioners. Her most celebrated image is “Migrant Mother,” the Depression-era photo of a mother’s worn look as she holds her infant and her two young children bury their faces in her neck. Lange made that image while working for the Farm Security Administration.

Fujihata’s exploration of Lange’s archives started through UCLA’s Yanai Initiative, where he produced a similar exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, that opened in 2022 to commemorate the events 80 years later.

For the Oakland exhibit, Fujihata explores a particular historical moment that occurred very near the Oakland Museum, at 1117 Oak St., now the home of Alameda County Law Library. This is where many Japanese American residents of the East Bay had to report just before being removed to Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno. From the East Bay alone, thousands of people ended up at Tanforan, including 1,494 people from Oakland, 1,182 from Berkeley, and 1,211 from Hayward.

“Store owners, students, seniors, teachers, community leaders were among those instructed to report to this building, bringing only what they could carry,” Dorothy Lazard, who was for many years the Oakland History Room’s historian and librarian, wrote in a post about that time for the Oakland Public Library.

The people, mostly U.S. citizens, were later shipped off to a wartime concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.

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Baggage of evacuees of Japanese ancestry piled on the sidewalk of Oak Street in Oakland, 1942. Credit: Dorothea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives
The executive order and ensuing exclusion orders gave people little time to prepare to leave the life as they knew it. The show includes photos that Lange took on the museum side of the street, where there was once a row of Victorian homes. We see piles of luggages in front of two homes, a reminder to viewers that people had to pack up their entire lives into what they could fit in a few bundles and suitcases.

Around 1,300 people of Japanese descent were ordered to assemble in Berkeley in 1942, at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley’s Pilgrim Hall. Berkeley’s Japanese American community was vibrant. There was a newspaper, the Japanese Women’s Herald, a grocery stores, florists, boarding houses for students attending UC Berkeley and a number of churches, including the Free Methodist Church on Derby and the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple on Oregon Street. Among the most famous residents was artist Chiura Obata, who began teaching at UC in 1932 and who had a studio on Telegraph Avenue.

In Oakland, historic documents show that 1,790 people of Japanese descent lived in the city in 1940, just before the removal order — among the largest Japanese American communities in the state, with homes largely concentrated near Chinatown and West Oakland.

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A sign reading “I am an American” placed in the window of the Wanto Co. store at Eighth and Franklin streets in Oakland, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The owner, a University of California graduate, would later be imprisoned by the War Relocation Authority for the duration of the war. Credit: Dorothea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives
Another famous photo by Lange shows a Japanese American-owned storefront there with the words, “I AM AN AMERICAN” displayed in bold letters. The photo was taken at 8th and Franklin streets, where a Chase bank now resides, in present-day Chinatown.

Just after the war, “the total number of people that returned [to Oakland] was 906,” according to Jonathan van Harmelen, the staff historian at Densho, an educational nonprofit that archives the history of Japanese American incarceration during the war, citing data collected by the War Relocation Authority.

Van Harmelen said this population decline tracks with broader patterns of post-war resettlement. Many people lost their homes and businesses during the war. When they tried to return to the West Coast, some faced hostility. Many young adults resettled in the Midwest and along the East Coast.

These historic events may resonate for visitors to the exhibit today, Adams said, as green card holders and US citizens are being detained, and sometimes disappeared, by ICE, including those who have committed no crimes.

Fujihata wanted to focus on the pivotal moment when people were about to board the bus, a moment that everyone who was forced into the camps shared. Once in the camps, their lives diverged and became more complex, with 10 main camps spread across multiple states away from the coasts, which were deemed exclusion zones. None knew what was to come.

“Some of the people thought the war would end in three months,” Fujihata said. In fact, many families were locked up for three and a half years.

‘Photographs of people at their most vulnerable’

The main exhibit is indoors, featuring massive reproductions of Lange’s photos and a new video by Fujihata of people reading the executive order, filmed in Oakland with East Bay residents.

In an interactive portion of the exhibit, you can take on the role of photographer during this moment in history. Walk up to a table to borrow a replica of the large-format Graflex camera that Lange often used. Wear it around your neck and look down into the viewfinder. You will be transported, via AR, to a scene where people are waiting to board a train in Little Tokyo. You decide what photos to take by pressing a button; there’s an iPhone inside the case, and the photos you take suddenly appear on a nearby wall, drawing attention to the choices you make.

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The inside of the modified graflex camera used in the augmented reality experience in “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” by artist Masaki Fujihata at Oakland Museum of California. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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A replica of the kind of camera used by Dorothea Lange in her documentation of the forced removal of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
Next to this AR experience are some of Lee’s photos of people waiting to board trains at the Santa Fe train station in Los Angeles, waiting with their luggage. In contrast to many of Lange’s more intimate portraits of families, Lee’s images zoom out to include news photographers and government officials within the frame, highlighting how many were witness to these forced incarcerations.

Fujihata’s exhibit poses some complex questions: What choices did those photographers make at the time? And what choices would you make in their shoes? Would you take photos of the officers enforcing the removals? Or would you take a photo of a child’s face as she sits and waits?

Today, we have phones available at most times, and we can choose document many things. What do we document? What rights do vulnerable subjects have?

Adams, the curator, sees Lange as a “humanist” and notes that her images of the removals were suppressed during the war. “She was living her values as a person and as a photographer that aligned with her view of justice,” Adam said. “But they’re still really complicated images. They’re photographs of people at their most vulnerable.”

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A new multipanel video installation by Fujihata, filmed in Oakland, features East Bay residents reading President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order that set in motion the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
Outside on the Oak Street Plaza, you can check out an iPad from a staffer at a table. When you look around the plaza through the screen, the space appears populated with dozens of people milling around or sitting with their suitcases. “They are actual humans,” Fujihata said, not AI. Fujihata filmed the scenes in Tokyo during the pandemic, and later in Los Angeles. The actors are everyday people alongside some professional actors. A few of them are elders who lived through the incarceration camps. Others are children or descendants of people who were incarcerated. One of the figures is Fujihata himself.

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Artist Masaki Fujihata holds a tablet that uses augmented reality to allow visitors to place themselves inside the moment of forced removal in Oakland in “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” which opened at the Oakland Museum of California September 18, 2026. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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The view through an iPad screen of the augmented reality exhibit in OMCA’s Oak Street Plaza, part of “BeHere/1942.” Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
If you look through the iPad out beyond the museum, you’ll see the buses waiting. The moment is a recreation of when families departed to Tanforan on a Thursday on May 7, 1942.

Many are wearing formal clothes; Fujihata had a costume designer find clothing characteristic of the 1940s. The scene is a reenactment, Fujihata said, but “when the public comes here to experience it, they will see it as something that happened in this space.”

He suspects that this part of the exhibit may bring up the deepest reactions, since visitors will be experiencing it so close to where the historical events occurred.

The exhibit also includes a resource area, where people can learn more about this history or take action. A series of postcards directs people to organizations, including Densho and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, which each host collections of photos and historical records. There’s a link to write a letter opposing the Trump administration’s plans to close the National Archives in San Francisco, located in San Bruno. The archives hold historic records dating back to the 1850s.

“The ground you’re standing on is where the events happened 80 years ago,” van Harmelen, who saw the exhibit in Los Angeles, said. “It helps people rethink where they are.”

OMCA has a permanent exhibit dedicated to the history of the Japanese American incarceration experience in the history gallery, called “Sent Away,” and some of Lange’s photos from this time period are featured in the gallery that displays items from the museum’s permanent collection. All of Lange’s photos for the WPA are in the public domain.

Lange continues to inspire new artforms. Poet Tess Taylor studied the archives at OMCA, which includes Lange’s notebooks from the time, and wrote a theatrical production called “Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.” Pop-up scenes from the play will be staged on October 17 at OMCA’s James Moore Theatre.

More than 40 years after Mae Yanagi and her family were rounded up and forced to live in the camps, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and reparations of $20,000.

In Oakland, other events memorialize the Japanese American residents who lost everything they’d built and spent the war incarcerated. The Oakland Asian Cultural Center hosts Day of Remembrance events, as do other Bay Area organizations. Descendents of the incarcerated also commemorate the events through pilgrimages to the actual prison camps, from Tule Lake and Manzanar in California to Rohwer in Arkansas.

Adams said her mother, now 91, was incarcerated at the camp at Tule Lake as a child. She said Fujihata’s view as an outsider, from Japan, gives the public an opportunity to see things in a new light. “He’s offering us a way to see things we wouldn’t have seen without his intense curiosity,” she said. … See MoreSee Less

Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese American incarceration are turned immersive at OMCA

www.berkeleyside.org

Some 1,800 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from Oakland in 1942. A new exhibit explores Dorothea Lange’s photos through augmented reality.

LaborFest

3 weeks ago

In ‘9 to 5,’ Dolly Parton Put a Friendly Face on Feminism In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem.
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/magazine/dolly-parton-9-to-5-feminism.html?searchResultPosition=1
By Susan Dominus
Published Aug. 27, 2026
Before a script for the movie “9 to 5” even existed — when it was still just a vague concept for a story about female office workers — Jane Fonda had a lightning bolt moment about how to cast it. She was in the car listening to the radio when a Dolly Parton song came on. Immediately, as Fonda later recalled on the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” an image popped into her head: “I suddenly had a vision of Dolly as a secretary,” she said. “She can’t see her hands, typing with those long fingernails. Everything about it made me laugh.”

Fonda approached Parton about the role. “How hard can this be?” Parton remembered thinking, in the 2022 documentary “Still Working 9 to 5.” “If it’s big, I’ll get to roll around in the glory, and if it’s a flop, I blame it on them.”

Parton made clear to Rolling Stone in 1980 that she did not take the role in order to be part of a feminist project. “Not that I’m not for rights for everybody,” she told the interviewer. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get involved in a political thing.” Whatever you thought about the movie, she implied, it was not, at least for her, a feminist cri de coeur about sexual harassment, equal pay, child care and job flexibility. “It’s just a funny, funny show,” she said — not, most definitely not, about “bosses in general or the plight of secretaries.”

Parton on the set of “9 to 5.”Credit…Steve Schapiro
Later on in life, Parton, who died on Tuesday, would acknowledge that the movie had “a good message,” but she was clearly ambivalent about being pinned down. Given her many good works — her donations to vaccine research, literacy, disaster relief — Parton’s evasiveness has been interpreted generously by her fans across the political spectrum: It was not so much about making herself marketable as it was about maintaining her status as a unifying cultural force. She seemed to intuit that the best way she could help women fight for equality was by expressing herself her way — without labels.

Despite Parton’s protestations, “9 to 5” was, in fact, developed explicitly as a movie about the experience of low-level office workers. During the years of anti-Vietnam activism that earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” Fonda had befriended another activist, Karen Nussbaum, who had started organizing secretaries and clerical workers, the jobs held by about a third of working women at the time. Fonda and her team interviewed dozens of them, many of whom spoke of overt sexism and sexual harassment; some responded enthusiastically when asked if they ever fantasized about getting even with their bosses. One said she wished she could grind up her boss and serve him in the office coffee.

In the film Fonda eventually developed, Parton plays a competent and sweet, happily partnered secretary who wears feminine dresses and a green sequined cardigan at the office. She and two co-workers, played by Fonda and Lily Tomlin, are fed up with their boss, whom they describe as a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” The three women undertake an absurdist revenge plot that involves keeping him in captivity for six weeks, even suspending him from the ceiling.

Both Fonda and Parton, in their own ways, were trying to manage feminism’s image problem, which persisted despite the movement’s success in opening up women’s lives over a remarkably short span of time. The movement started picking up momentum in the early 1960s, but gained enormous visibility in 1970, when Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” helped launch the Women’s Strike for Equality, which included rallies, walkouts and teach-ins around the country on Aug. 26 of that year. Some 50,000 women protested in New York City alone, effectively shutting down Fifth Avenue.

In 1971, Gloria Steinem, already a powerhouse political and feminist organizer, co-founded Ms. magazine, which sold out its first 300,000 copies within eight days and helped mainstream the language and mission of female equality. Within the decade, the movement had made significant strides: The passage of Title IX expanded girls’ access to sports and academic opportunities in schools; legislation made it illegal for banks to discriminate on the basis of sex, meaning a woman could no longer be required to provide a signed letter from her husband to receive a line of credit; and a 1978 amendment to the Civil Rights Act made it illegal for employers to discriminate against women on the basis of pregnancy. The Supreme Court also decided Roe v. Wade, establishing a constitutional right to abortion that would stand for nearly 50 years.

And yet even as many of these gains were broadly popular, the feminist movement was still viewed with suspicion, especially by conservatives who associated it with its most radical forms — calls for women to reject men, motherhood and caregiving. If feminists weren’t stereotyped as unshaven and man-hating, they were alternatively construed as out of touch and elite. The comedians Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin satirized those tropes in a 1981 parody sketch called “I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t,” in which O’Hara proclaims she’s happy only when she’s working 21 hours a day and Martin complains that she feels like a prisoner in her own home. Even as series like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” used humor to gently push forward feminist ideals, feminists were typically the butt of jokes in stand-up routines and on late-night shows.

Parton knew that Fonda was being strategic by casting her in “9 to 5,” in the hopes of bringing in a Southern audience. Fonda has been even more explicit that she viewed the movie’s humor as a vehicle for delivering a strong feminist message in a palatable way. “Even if people don’t want to deal with the issues we’re raising,” Fonda told the producer of “Dolly Parton’s America,” “they’ll like the movie anyway, because it’s really funny.”
Image

Parton with the director Colin Higgins on the set of “9 to 5.”Credit…Steve Schapiro
I saw the film at age 10 with my sister, and I think it’s safe to say our reaction was shared by countless viewers: It was Parton who made us laugh the hardest, who we were really rooting for. The rage and revenge on display in the film might have seemed unhinged or ugly — the stuff of violent radicals — but somehow, with Parton at the center, their actions seemed almost plucky: You could push a sweet, smiling flower of a human only so far before she’d show you what she was made of.

The movie was not only a blockbuster — it made $100 million at the box office, the second biggest hit of the year — but according to the organizers who helped Fonda conceive it, it also changed culture in precisely the way they hoped it would. Before its release, “we had to argue that women’s work was plagued by discrimination,” Nussbaum was quoted as saying in Fonda’s memoir, “My Life So Far.” “The movie put an end to that debate. … The audiences recognized it and could laugh at it. Now the debate could shift to what we should do about it.” Ellen Cassedy, an organizer who worked with Nussbaum, said the movie “changed my life, and I can say that without a doubt, it changed offices, bosses and the whole atmosphere of office life.”

It’s unlikely that the movie would have been as effective without “9 to 5,” the theme song Parton wrote for it (a condition of her taking the role). The song starts with a driving, repeating single note, the song’s beating heart, music that’s quickly overlaid with what sounds like a clacking typewriter, even the ping of a carriage. Written on set, with Parton’s acrylic nails her only instrument as she worked it out, the song universalizes the experiences of “folks like me, on the job, from 9 to 5.” Everyone starts their day with that cup of ambition; everyone has that boss who’s on the make; everyone hates on the man while simultaneously despairing of ever joining his ranks.

The song is sometimes considered a feminist anthem, but as the Canadian podcast “Material Girls” pointed out in March, it might be better considered a rallying cry for what the historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “labor feminism.” Labor feminism brought working-class women into the fold, recognizing, in Cobble’s words, that “the personal interaction between men and women at work and the sexploitation of women’s bodies were as much labor issues as wages and benefits.” On the album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs,” on which Parton released the song, her sympathies with labor are in some ways more pronounced than her allegiance to feminism: She chose to cover the famous Woody Guthrie labor and immigrants’ rights song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a raw and heartbreaking story of erasure and exploitation.

Like Parton herself, the song “9 to 5” is unexpected as a feminist symbol — it’s playful, unlike many of the most important feminist anthems of the ’70s, which demanded respect, talked of survival, of being petrified. (In “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy speaks of “wisdom born of pain.”) Fonda has said that she knew, from the moment she heard it the first time, it would be a cultural landmark: “If this movie’s not a big hit, this song will be — it’ll make us a hit,” she said in the 2022 documentary.

Parton took real professional risks in collaborating with Fonda, who earned the enduring enmity of thousands of Americans after she was photographed, laughing, sitting on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun while on a visit to Hanoi in 1972. In one of the early interview clips featured in the 2022 documentary, Parton suggested she was not having an easy time being asked “how I deal with Jane, what my folks think about Jane, and what the South thinks about me being a friend of Jane.”

But Parton never seemed to have regrets about making the film. She was herself a savvy career woman, and the film — her first — catapulted her into a new level of celebrity. Whatever her intentions, her performance can be credited with smashing the clichés of what a feminist looked like, even if she wouldn’t use that word to describe herself. She also helped reframe feminism’s image to emphasize more universally relatable demands for an egalitarian, humane workplace — better pay, better conditions, more respect. Getting ahead, getting the raise, getting the credit: It’s a song every American can hum along to.

Photographs by Steve Schapiro/Corbis, via Getty Images
Corrected on Sept. 2, 2026: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the sound effect in Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” The song features the ping of a typewriter carriage, not a cartridge.
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.
Susan Dominus has been a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine since 2011. … See MoreSee Less

In ‘9 to 5,’ Dolly Parton Put a Friendly Face on Feminism

www.nytimes.com

In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem.

LaborFest

4 weeks ago

‘Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages’
www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/arts-exhibits/article/fashion-painting-sculpture-fall-22375459.php
“Quantum #3” by Dewey Crumpler, from the “Entanglement” series (2026).
“Quantum #3” by Dewey Crumpler, from the “Entanglement” series (2026).
Francis Baker/Jenkins Johnson Gallery
‘Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages’
Dewey Crumpler is getting his first solo museum show in San Francisco, bringing together five decades of his painting practice with his new kinetic sculptures.
Crumpler, who lives in Oakland and was an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, has long explored larger cosmic themes in his work. Curated by Key Jo Lee, who serves as the exhibition will focus on the artist’s “investigations into Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory, and time.”
It will also present his work in conversations with other art forms including jazz, while examining Crumpler’s place in both the history of Black abstraction and the culture of the Bay Area.
“Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages” opens Sept. 30, at MoAD in conjunction with Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the museum’s annual celebration of Black art across the region.
This year, more than 58 arts organizations, galleries and creative hubs are participating, along with more than 70 Black artists and cultural leaders. Participating venues include the San Francisco Public Library, Oakland Museum of California, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Minnesota Street Project, COL Gallery, and African American Art & Culture Complex.
“Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages”: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday-Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday. Sept. 30-May 30. $7-$15. Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St., S.F. 415-358-7200. www.moadsf.org
Nexus/Black Art Week: Sept. 30-Oct. 4. Various locations throughout the Bay Area. For a full schedule, visit www.nexus-sfbay.com.
— Tony Bravo … See MoreSee Less

Museum of the African Diaspora

www.moadsf.org

Contemporary Art Museum in San Francisco | 685 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94105