OHA Annual Meeting and Picture This: Oakland's Redevelopment Through Photos

Please join us for our Annual Meeting for OHA members and board elections on January 16, 2025 from 6:30-7pm. Afterwards, we will have a lecture, open to the public, by Moriah Ulinskas called “Picture This: Oakland's Tumultuous Redevelopment History Through Photographs.” The meeting and lecture will be in-person, held at the Oakland Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave.

This presentation examines how photographs shaped Oakland's post-war declension narrative and calls for a reexamination of these images in order to reestablish the agency of communities dispossessed by redevelopment programs, especially in West Oakland. Through these photographs, we will track the physical changes to Oakland's urban landscape, showing how redevelopment transformed the city's architecture and neighborhoods. We will look at photographs produced by city agencies as well as photographs taken by artists and activists who lived and worked in Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s, during the peak of the city's redevelopment activities.

Bio: Moriah Ulinskas is an audiovisual archivist and PhD candidate in Public History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW), a collective of film and video archivists who work to help communities maintain intellectual control over their legacy recordings. She has worked as a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, SMOMA, San Francisco Arts Commission, and was the manager of the Diversity & Inclusion Fellowship Pilot Program for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She has published articles in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, Places Journal, The Moving Image, and the Journal of Archival Organization.

Host or Publisher Oakland Heritage Alliance