Born of the Bear Dance – Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California places Indigenous life in California at the center of the frame. On view from September 10 to December 20, 2026 at the Monterey Museum of Art, the exhibition draws from the Oakland Museum of California’s permanent collection and presents more than three decades of work by Dugan Aguilar, a photographer whose images resist the usual flattening of Native history.
Aguilar, who belonged to the Mountain Maidu, Pit River and Walker River Paiute tribes, photographed Native communities across California and Nevada for four decades. His pictures document ceremony, daily life, family gathering and spiritual practice without turning them into spectacle. Instead, they carry the rhythm of lived continuity. The exhibition makes clear that his work did not simply record a disappearing past. It showed communities speaking in the present, with cultural traditions and lived experience moving together.
That perspective matters in a state where Indigenous histories have often been pushed aside by broader colonial narratives. Aguilar’s photographs push back by showing Native California as active, complex and enduring. The title itself, Born of the Bear Dance, points toward a cultural world grounded in tradition and collective memory. The images give that world a visual record shaped by care rather than distance.
The exhibition also arrives with unusual archival weight. Aguilar’s body of work, including more than 20,000 negatives and prints, now sits in the Oakland Museum of California collection, securing a major resource for future research and public viewing. That acquisition underlines the importance of his archive, but the photographs themselves remain the strongest argument for his place in California art history. They are direct, unsentimental and deeply attentive to the people he photographed.
Curated by Drew Heath Johnson, the exhibition draws on a long engagement with California photography and with the state’s visual history. Here that history is widened to include an Indigenous perspective that has long been essential, even when overlooked.
Image: Dugan Aguilar (1949–2018), Jennifer Bates (Northern Sierra Mewuk), Oakland Big Time, 1996, reproduction of gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the family of Dugan Aguilar. 2021.7.878 R
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