She made a note to chronicle her journey from the wilds of India to the Oakland Museum of California in a book, sometime in the near future. It had been epic journey that involved being hidden for months on end in a crate that barely allowe...d movement as she sailed halfway round the world to reach her destination. A journey full of near misses that made her a believer in miracles. Now, she just needed to push her way out of the crate so that she could explore her surroundings and stretch her legs.See More

In the irreverent new exhibit, "Once a Believer: Why the Two Party System Failed Us", the Oakland Museum of California chronicles (indeed spoofs!) the current climate of political discourse in America. Occasionally the show seems a bit sti...ff, as in this piece, which purports to expose the intemperate, thinly-veiled political ideologies which have been re-packaged and re-sold to the American electorate as progressive conservatism. But to their credit, the OMCA curatorial team gives equal weight to follies and foibles from the blue side of the aisle...See More

In an effort to break new ground with cross disciplinary practices - a key feature of the Oakland Museum of California's programming - curator Rene de Guzman and artist Mark Dion recently invented "Packxidermy" - a process of packing taxide...rmied pachyderms. They stumbled upon the idea when their original experiments of Trunkatology (the process of putting truncated elephant trunks into trunks) proved both messy and ethically dubious. The immediate success of their Packxidermical investigation (which they sent to Paxton Gate via taxi for good measure and homophonic-heterographical emphasis) has made Believers of them both and they are already starting to Chronicle further studies of a similar vein. Museum visitors can look forward in the next year to fascinating hybrid, tribrid, and potentially tetrabridic-themed exhibitions such as Electro-Chocolate Therapy (an examination of experimental epicurean psychiatry), Diorrhamanetics (Scientological set-design in shoe boxes that induces bowel relaxation), and Abstructure Exprussianism (a radical form of Latvian painting based on muscle building sit-ups and crunches).See More

A believer in the quantum theory of superposition wrote to the Oakland Museum of California, suggesting the curators re-enact Schrödinger's cat experiment with an elephant. Upon receiving a written response from the museum, the believer hes...itated to open the envelope. Given Schrödinger's theory, until the letter was opened and read, was the answer from the curators both yes and no? The believer felt it was better to endure the suspense and leave the letter unopened, the contents unknown, the outcome unchronicled. See More