Rene de Guzman, the Oakland Museum of California's Senior Curator (photo by Konrad Auer)

On Tuesday, the Oakland Museum of California hosted a press luncheon and a quick look at its $58 million dollar renovation, which will be finished next May. The museum’s public relations team has been touting the remade galleries as spaces that will last for many future generations. As the museum’s executive director Lori Fogarty says, “Just as California is not a ‘fixed place’ but constantly evolving, this museum is embracing change and new ideas. It’s in our DNA.”

The museum anticipated future generations when it was built 40 years ago. Long before the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park unveiled it’s variable surface, moving, living roof, Kevin Roche designed the Oakland Museum of California with a living roof, and the strongest outdoor sculpture garden of any Bay Area Museum.

It looks as if the updates overseen by San Francisco architectural firm Mark Cavegnero and Associates, which began in January 2008, are staying true to the museum’s forward-thinking tradition.

After lunch, senior curator René de Guzman led the press on a short tour of the expanded permanent art exhibition space, and one of three new, rotating multi-use exhibition spaces.

The biggest surprise was not the talk of “art lounges” where one can drink coffee in view of a Mel Ramos pop art nudie paintings, or the more inclusive and multicultural remaking of their once dated history section, or even the expansion into deep interactivity, but the complete and utter restructuring of their exhibition spaces. There will be two and half times more space for art than before the renovation.

The buzzword used in the press materials for what the museum is trying to get at is “malleable.” Every gallery section looks on into the next with large glass walls. White walls replace the old concrete. There are sections dedicated to local art movements such as the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Funk Art.

Less traditional and even more forward thinking is a section committed to portraiture, whether it be photographic, drawn or painted -- era and genre be damned – hung in the salon style most recently re-popularized by the artists of the Mission School like Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen. Each piece struggles for context in the clutter of several dozen pieces placed side by side. It works.

Integration becomes more than a trendy tagline in the new museum where art shares space with natural history exhibits, and sections of the museum gently lap into each other down newly built sloping walkways.

René de Guzman guided us through his vision for the museum, as his movements accented his passion for place, history and culture: “We are trying to make the postmodern moment real through a blending of history and art – we are trying to suggest a conversation through the placement of art.”

Two new additions to the museum’s permanent collection are emblematic of the new approach. The Date Farmers, two artists working under one name, who were featured in The Oakland Museum’s recent survey of Los Angeles based artists, have now found a home in a salon-style assemblage at the redone museum. 

In this collection, Mexican-American culture wrestles with issues of identity and touches on tropes of pop and street art. They are a favorite of popular underground art magazine Juxtapoz, having been covered there numerous times. As “hip” artists go, such a placing in a museum’s collection legitimizes both the artists and the museum’s new multi-cultural direction.

Another addition is the “The Fallen Easel” by John Baldessari. This piece is important and unusual, because irony isn’t as central to it as in his other works and represents, as the title playfully and pointedly suggests, the end of painting for a noted artist and the beginning of a more celebrated period as a conceptualist.

In it, framed multiples, seemingly static and yet also cinematic are placed into a form suggesting an easel fallen in what appears defeat and what is finally revealed as rebirth. It was the central, most pivotal piece in his print retrospective this summer at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum.

De Guzman didn’t reveal much about future exhibitions, but he did say that one would be a major retrospective of the work of Emeryville-based Pixar Animation, which easily could be a nationally touring show, not to mention a big draw for visitors.

The second is an intriguing show from installation artist Mark Dion whose work was recently covered in the latest season of PBS’ Art:21. According to Brooklyn-based art consultant Christine D’Aleo he, “…will be creating multiple installations in all the galleries of “orphans” from the museum’s collections that don’t fit into any political or art historical narrative.”

De Guzman added that long mothballed objects such as model baby elephants and a large collection of Polynesian artifacts will find their way into installations.  These two shows auger well for the future of the museum. De Guzman has several well-received big shows to his credit such as the internationally touring “Beautiful Losers” and “Black Panther Rank and File.”

The results of all these grand plans remain to be seen, but it is clear from even this cursory viewing and teasing that this is a space well worth watching. You’ll get your chance in May 2010.