As I entered the art galleries of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a boy, maybe eight years old, sat leaning into his father. They were watching, intently, Will Rogan’s video One Thing I Can Tell You Is You’ve Got to Be Free (2000). A quirky, deadpan ode to the art spirit, the six-minute loop sets an unpretentious tone for the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection. In each of a series of eighteen vignettes, an object in motion—a bouncing ball, a paper airplane, a tossed shoe—flies into the frame toward an improbable target and makes a perfect landing. The ball plops into a glass of beer, the paper airplane noses into a keyhole, the shoe lodges in the space between a suitcase stand and a gilt-framed mirror. It’s mesmerizing. It is also a challenging work with which to greet a general audience that might be expecting painting or sculpture, and a magically apt metaphor for the creative process.

I doubt that the boy and his father analyzed the metaphor, but they paid attention, sitting through the entire loop three times. Creating this kind of engagement for a family audience is what the reinstallation is all about. At the time that Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman and then-Chief Curator of Art Philip Linhares (Linhares retired in June 2011) redesigned the galleries, the museum was a city-funded institution. But the City of Oakland was in financial trouble, and on July 1, 2011, a little over a year after the museum debuted its new look, the city turned responsibility for its funding over to a private foundation. The collections remain the property of the city, as they have been since 1916, but their continued care and display depends on the foundation’s ability to attract community funding and support.

The museum is within walking distance of the lively artists’ neighborhood that developed in a semi-industrial part of the city when rents in nearby San Francisco soared. On the first Friday of each month, the museum and nearby art galleries stay open late and the streets are literally thronged with people, food carts, and musicians. The museum’s longevity will depend in part on its ability to connect this artists’ Oakland with the rest of the city, traditionally an economically and culturally divided populace.

In the vestibule leading to the museum’s galleries, the curators use a photomural of California artists at work, ranging from nineteenth-century painter William Keith to modernist sculptor Ruth Asawa and the contemporary duo The Date Farmers, to start bridging the divide. The photomural wordlessly indicates that artists have been part of the community from the beginning (which might be assumed in London or New York, but is relevant here because artists from California are rarely featured in the art-historical accounts a general audience encounters). It also communicates that all kinds of people are artists as well as emphasizing the experience of artists as workers. The curators drive that point home by fronting the mural with a display of artists’ tools, from a battered plein-air painting kit to a clamshell Macintosh laptop.

While it is fair to say that that the entry has a populist vibe, once inside viewers will encounter plenty of uncommon concepts. Objects ranging in date from 1849 to 2010 are arranged according to networks of meaning that can be accessed from different points. Just past Rogan’s video, there is a quartet of big, spectacular works: Zhan Wang’s Gold Mountain Collection (2007), a group of steel replicas of rocks from Chinese mining camps of the Gold Rush era; Richard Misrach’s photograph Untitled (2007/2009), a negative-image pigment print showing a rocky Pacific beach; Thomas Hill’s painting Yosemite Valley (from Below Sentinel Dome, as Seen from Artist’s Point) (1876); and a vivid installation by Barry McGee, Untitled (2010), with two brightly patterned surf boards leaning against a wall. The boards look as if they might have popped out from the array of irregular painted shapes, all bursting with color and pattern, covering the barn-red wall.

Someone looking for an arrangement that can be interpreted by chronology or style will find the room full of non sequiturs. Individually, these are attention-grabbing pieces, and for some viewers their excitements of scale and color will be enough. But if one looks for the logic behind grouping these visually disparate works together, connections are easily made. Wang’s rocks are fractal bits of the land forms in Hill’s and Misrach’s works. Misrach and McGee bracket the range of iconic West Coast beach experiences, Misrach offering a cold, lonesome walk while McGee draws on exuberant surf culture. One might consider the comment by Wang, who is from China, on the experience of Chinese immigrants, in concert with Hill’s depiction of three tourists in Yosemite, presumably European immigrants or their near-descendants.

The form of the exhibition sensitizes the viewer to California’s continuous, simultaneous engagement with multiple cultures. All texts are presented in Chinese, English, and Spanish, and each language is given equal visual weight—there’s no sequestering the non-English words in tiny type or added-on labels. The seemingly simple commitment to equal fonts signals viewers to think about all the varieties of experience that have contributed to the state.

The reality of California, with its mix of Asian, Latin, and European heritages, was never well represented in the standard model of modern art. The work of Japanese-American painter Chiura Obata, for example, was hard to see as historically important if one believed that modernism’s significant encounter with Asian art transpired in the nineteenth century, via Japanese prints in Parisian studios. Obata, a Japanese immigrant and art department faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1953, was respected as a teacher. But critically he was damned if he drew from Asian art traditions, which to 1930s modernist eyes seemed retro, and damned if he did not, since his “difference” as an Asian immigrant meant few viewers would take him seriously as a mainstream artist. That “difference” had other, even more serious, consequences—during World War II, Obata and his family were sent to internment camps. He started an art school in each of the camps where he was imprisoned and survived the harsh conditions to continue a long and prolific career after his release.

What the installation does and does not do with Obata’s story is emblematic of the values that guided the curators. De Guzman and Linhares included a painting by Obata in a sequence of landscapes depicting California’s Central Valley. His Melody of Wave (Pyramid Lake, Nevada) (1933), a watercolor and gouache on silk, is a deceptively simple composition showing a wave emerging from the depths of the lake, or perhaps ripples gathering on the water’s surface—mysteriously, the viewpoint is simultaneously subsurface and aerial. The profile of the wave’s forward edge hints at a face, suggesting a figurehead at the prow of a ship. The painting is a subtle marriage of opposites: intimate distances, fluid forms, energized stillness. On the label there is a small portrait photograph of Obata with his tools, also from OMCA’s collection, but no other biographical information.

The other works in the sequence date from the late nineteenth century to 1985. The opportunity to compare different treatments of similar landscapes could keep a viewer busy parsing effects for a long time. The elusive qualities of Obata’s work become even more apparent when compared to Rinaldo Cuneo’s oil painting Earth Patterns (ca. 1932), an equally stylized, but utterly grounded and dense painting, without a trace of the changeability that marks Melody. Is the formal juxtaposition enough? Does one need to know that Cuneo, a native San Franciscan, studied with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and in his time exhibited in almost every major show in the area? Or that his family, established as they were (his mother was the first female bank director in the United States), also suffered from the xenophobia of other U.S. citizens during World War II? (Because he was an immigrant from Italy, Cuneo’s brother-in-law, who had been a naturalized citizen for forty-three years, received an exclusion order in 1942, and died while separated from his family.)

The choices the curators made foreground the work, the creative process, and themes and styles that are particularly Californian. They privilege visual connections over narrative sense and thus downplay art history, biography, and socio-political context. Yet this is not to say that the installation is apolitical or ahistorical. In places, it is quite radical—I could almost hear the BANG! of the modernist narrative exploding as I entered the section devoted to the work of Joan Brown. Brown has generally been classed as a second-generation Bay Area Figurative painter; thus, not being “first” (a position generally accorded to David Park), of lesser importance. Previously, she was represented at OCMA by her most famous work, Girl Sitting (1962), and the large painting Models with Manuel’s Sculpture (1961), displayed with a figure by Manuel Neri, her second husband. Now, Brown has her own section, in the center of the galleries, and is the only artist accorded a full story of creative development.

Models with Manuel’s Sculpture can still be considered in proximity to Neri’s sculpture, which stands in the next room, and the dialogue between the painting and the sculpture continues to be intriguing. But Brown’s relationship with Neri was only one chapter in her career. In the new installation viewers can see how the thick, clotted mass of paint strokes at the center of her Abstract Expressionist painting Brambles (1957) spread out in Barstow (1958) to suggest a space rather than an object, then merged into the unity of space and figure that is Girl Sitting. Then one can follow Brown as she hews to the figure but jettisons the slabs of thick oil paint in favor of ultra-flat enamel in Portrait of Carolyn Singer (1971). This trajectory, from Abstract Expressionism to a figurative hybrid and then onto something very different, is paradigmatic of the creative route taken by other Bay Area Figurative painters (Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Paul Wonner, and perhaps Park himself, had he lived longer.)

The political struggle that made it possible for Brown to be designated the representative artist from among her peers is visually addressed by a humorous and effective confrontation in a neighboring gallery where Viola Frey’s Pink Lady (ca. 1965), a gloriously frumpy stoneware woman with big hips and knobby knees, regards Rupert Schmid’s white marble goddess, California Venus (ca. 1895). A visitor who needs women’s movement from ideal to real players spelled out will have to travel a few steps more to the gallery themed “Radical Acts: Resistance and Struggle,” which focuses on the explicitly political art of the late1960s and 1970s, or wait for the exhibition’s conclusion with three videos by Eleanor Antin. But for alert viewers, the message has been delivered.

In like manner, while Obata’s personal experience is not mentioned, the injustice of the World War II internment camps is communicated forcefully and economically in two photographs by Dorothea Lange, Japanese Children with Tags, Hayward, CA (1942), showing a bewildered boy and girl marked for incarceration, and Untitled (Headlines, Oakland, California) (1942), with newspapers screaming, “Ouster of All Japs in California Near!” Lange, of course, is also a nationally known photographer who made major contributions to documentary practice and challenged the values of her peers in the F-64 group, themes that are also served by this selection of photographs.

As I contemplated the multiple roles played by the photographs, and every other object the curators linked into their version of the past 150-plus years, an artist friend appeared behind me. Her family was in town, and they were going through the galleries together. “I never know what to think of this place,” she said, “They have some great works. But it’s so provincial.”

Her words lingered in my mind, sand in the oyster of this review. They were not complimentary, although the mission of the Oakland Museum of California is to be provincial, in the sense of being local, peculiar to a particular place. But is the exhibition provincial in the second sense of being narrow, illiberal, or parochial? The questions of diversity that it addresses so gracefully, and so visually, are at the center of contemporary art discourse. There is always more history than can be told, but the curators have given us a resonant and useful story for today.