Gertrude Stein’s Oakland
Oakland Public Library, Main Branch
Through April 30, 2024
“When there was there and when it wasn’t or was it.”
As one of Oakland’s many internationally famous artists, Gertrude Stein left an indelible mark on the town. She also moved away at a fairly young age, never to return as a resident. She did, however, touch back down 30 years later to deliver lectures locally, already a well known author.
Lining hallway walls of the second floor of the Oakland Library’s main location, overlooking Lake Merritt, are dozens of black and white photographs, depicting our beloved town as it stood from the 1850s through the 1950s. Together they create a context for Stein’s infamous quote above.
Stein’s actual involvement in the contents of this exhibit remains unclear to me despite having read the website blurb many times now and having spoken with a librarian while there. I can only surmise that she curated and/or captioned the photos. Most are beautifully and professionally captured over the course of about a century. The captions — some short, others several lines long — are descriptive and sometimes poetic, others acerbic, a few contemplative. They project a keen curiosity but also some distance from the subjects, the subject. Her one-time home, Oakland clearly remained an important place to the writer. But while loving, the words do not read as those of an intimately invested individual.
They chronicle the rise of the city, literally, in its beams and workforce, muddy flats and bridge cables. Some are idyllic, with beautiful parks that no longer exist, others picturesque scenes that could have been plucked from Western movie sets. They share tender portraits of young children at the lake, some playing on a poorly furnished playground. Another, taken in 1888, shows children next to a tree captioned to be gone by 1952 but that could easily have been taken today, a new tree cradling the curve of the water just the same.
Schools, city buildings, and other public spaces loom large, vastly different than today’s landscape, long gone. The fourth city hall building is pictured, shot at 1:20 p.m. year unknown — we’re on number five now, and have been since 1914. Some met disastrous fates (I counted several fires listed along with 1906’s major earthquake); others have simply changed names or forms in the century since. Magnificent feats of craftsmanship, in the form of ships, Victorian homes, and one very spiffy automobile (helmed by another of Oakland’s famous writers, Joaquin Miller), offer at once a frivolous and sensitive and deeply curious look at those who built and drove before us.
These slices of our town’s history are far more riveting than your average hallway display, and well worth a visit. Their content and visual impact —some crisp and precise, others grainy beyond aesthetics, others still soft, nearly painterly, otherworldly — offer the chance to transport, back in time but still in place.
