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Oakland Museum of California Opens Art Exhibition in Newly Transformed Gallery of California Natural Sciences on May 31

Oakland, CA, (April 11, 2013)—More than 60 iconic and surprising masterworks of painting, photography, and works on paper will take their place in the Oakland Museum of California’s (OMCA) newly transformed Gallery of California Natural Sciences when it reopens its doors to the public May 31 in a special exhibition entitled Inspiration Points: Masterpieces of California Landscape. Curated by OMCA’s Curator of Photography and Visual Culture Drew Johnson, the works in the exhibition explore the human presence in the landscape over two centuries, creating a nexus of art, natural science, and history.

The artworks included in Inspiration Points have been carefully selected from the Museum’s extensive and pre-eminent holdings of California art from the Gold Rush era to the present to tell the stories of how people have interacted with the natural world. Artists featured will include Ansel Adams, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, David Hockney, William Keith, Arthur Mathews, Richard Misrach, Thomas Moran, and more. The exhibition will be divided into several areas of focus that reflect artists’ depiction of the landscape from a celebration of California’s sublime natural world, to the documentation of exploitation of natural resources, to the investigation of the intersection of the urban and “wild.”