Kija Lucas: "Hidden Histories"
5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland
January 11 - April 27, 2025
Enter the elegant Spanish Colonial Revival style gallery of the Mills College Art Museum and you’re immediately frozen in place by the enormous photograph of a magnolia blossom head-on. Printed on vinyl and framed by a giant, ornately embellished gilt frame, the huge piece arrests, even confronts, anyone who enters the museum. The heroically scaled-up flower is set against a stark black background on a standing wall painted a rich blue-violet, something that underscores the imposing, almost intimidating presence of “Untitled (Magnolia).”
There’s no way to circumvent this visually deafening overture to Kija Lucas’s “Hidden Histories.” But everything in the show is visually inescapable. It’s a symphonically grandiose exhibit in the best of ways. Yet its subjects are unassuming botanicals: flowers, fruits, and leaves.
The walls of the gorgeous 100-year-old space are instead covered in dazzling floral wallpapers designed and created by Lucas herself. I counted six different patterns, each blending nearly imperceptibly into the other. The effect of the botanical photos on these walls—all in classical-style frames that evoke those that might be seen at London’s National Portrait Gallery—is spellbinding: the clash between the photos and the buzzingly busy wallpaper works in the most unexpected way. It’s a remarkable juxtaposition where less is definitely not more, both confusing and calming to the eye. The dark backdrops serve as a perfect counterpoint to the bursting colors of the walls they’re hung on. Lucas’ curatorial insight and confidence blew me away.
Below most of the works sit white circles. After downloading the Black Terminus app (from a QR code just inside the entrance to the museum), visitors can stand in these circles and use the app bring Lucas’ pieces alive with lively animated descriptions, botanical histories, and how they were created. I’m not much for this kind of tech, but in this case the AR truly does augment the experience. (Another technological element of the show is the fact that a virtual visit can be made through the museum’s website: hidden-histories – Mills College Art Museum.)
At the center of the exhibit’s main space are display cases containing antique botanical prints. As Lucas states, her work is in “direct opposition to 18th-century botanist Carl Linnaeus’ system of taxonomy… Linnaeus established a rank-based classification of organisms that still serves as a foundation for biological understanding and that ultimately served as the model for the construction of scientific categories of race and sexuality.” The prints on display are a complement to Lucas’s pieces in that she “treats the cultivated plants, weeds, native, and non-native species she gathers equally, challenging the scientific framework society has inherited from Linnaeus.”
I didn’t perceive anything to do with race or sexuality in Lucas’s work; or really even a notion of taxonomy. But artists’ motivations and philosophies aren’t always apparent to the viewer. What interested me was the exhibit’s fascinating and absorbing polychromatic wonders: a bonanza of visual delights all based in the world’s flora.
After exploring the excellent group show in the other half of the museum’s expansive space, “Photography and the Specimen” (on exhibit through March 23rd—a show I could have spent hours wandering through), the museum was readying to close for the day and so it was time to go.
Back outside the museum’s carved Baroque stone façade, I noticed Hippocrates’s words chiseled into it: ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS, and I couldn’t help thinking of that wisdom in terms of Kija Lucas’s work. Her botanical subjects possess the shortest of lives: plants that live and perish so quickly. Yet the life Lucas gives them has a permanence and perpetuity that’s symphonious, surprising, and beautiful.
