Oakland Museum of California

Exhibitions

BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration

Oakland, OMCA, Sept 18 – Dec 27, 2026

Dates: September 18 – December 27, 2026
Location: Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)
Website: https://museumca.org

BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration will open at the Oakland Museum of California on September 18, 2026. This iteration of the project also incorporates immersive installations of historic images and augmented reality (AR) experiences, but adds new elements specific to the Bay Area. Installations draw from Dorothea Lange’s 1942 photographs of San Francisco and Oakland, some of which were taken directly across the street from what is now Oakland Museum of California.

The exhibition also incorporates a new three-screen video featuring local residents, some with connections to the story of Japanese American incarceration and others impacted by present-day anti-immigrant policies.

Oakland, California. Boarding a bus at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station for Tanfora. Photograph by Dorothea Lange. Negative. National Archives 537705.

The exhibit will extend into Oak Street Plaza, where a life-size image of Japanese Americans lined up to board buses creates the basis for an AR experience. When visitors look through the BeHere app, they will see images of buses and people moving as they might have in 1942 layered over the plaza.

Keisuke Tanaka, Takayuki Ochiai, a staff member of Cresent, Inc., Yasuhito Nagahara, Masaki Fujihata, and Yasutaka Fukuda. Photography by Shiho Fukuda. Courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum.