Revealing the Unseen: How Art and Augmented Reality Expose Hidden Histories

The 2025 Jane Green Endowed Lecture in Visual Culture, Revealing the Unseen: How Art and Augmented Reality Expose Hidden Histories, will be a public conversation between artist Kija Lucas and augmented reality creator Damien McDuffie, moderated by Oakland Museum of California Deputy Director Makeda Best, co-founder of Museums Moving Forward, and esteemed curator and historian of photography. The event will be followed by a catered reception.

The trio will discuss making hidden histories and associated content come to life with art and AR; the intersection of art and STEM; using AR to collaborate with artists, storytellers, and cultural institutions; anti-racist art and museum practices; and equity- and access-driven app development and media tools.

This event is planned in conjunction with the Mills College Art Museum exhibition, , on view from January 11-April 27, 2025. The exhibition features brand new work by the titular artist, augmented with AR experiences by Black Terminus, an Oakland-based AR design firm with a global reach founded by Damien McDuffie.

Co-sponsored by the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences.

PANELIST BIOS

Makeda Best
is the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, where she oversees the Curatorial, Collections, and Production Departments. A scholar of American photography, her past exhibition projects include Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America and Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970 (Harvard Art Museums), On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith (Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati). Most recently, her exhibition American Job, 1940-2011 opened at the International Center for Photography, New York. In addition to contributing to numerous exhibition catalogues on topics ranging from Kodak cameras, Bettye Saar’s notebooks, photography and architecture, and the Black Arts Movement, Best is the author of the book Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in 19th-Century America. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Studio Photography. She is a co-founder and current board member of the advocacy organization Museums Moving Forward.

Kija Lucas is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Her work has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, California Institute of Integral Studies, Palo Alto Arts Center, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, and Root Division, as well as Venice Arts in Los Angeles, CA, La Sala d’Ercole/Hercules Hall in Bologna Italy, and Casa Escorsa in Guadalajara, Mexico. Lucas has been an Artist in Residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Grin City Collective, and The Wassaic Artist Residency. Lucas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Mills College. (Photo credit: Damien Maloney)

Damien McDuffie is a creative technologist, digital archivist, and augmented reality (AR) artist and developer from Oakland. He is the founder of Black Terminus AR, a camera app and augmented reality art studio in your pocket that helps bring archives to life. His mission is to keep redlining out of the metaverse by developing and inspiring the next generation of Black creative technologists to use culture and art as a way into creative tech.

Host or Publisher Mills College Art Museum