Curator Talk: Makeda Best on “Containing Multitudes”
Please join us for a lecture and conversation with Makeda Best, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California Art, and Casey Riley, Chair of Global Contemporary Art at Mia, in connection with the “Containing Multitudes” exhibition.
Like other American thinkers of the 19th century, Walt Whitman, through his writing, poetry, and the production of his own likenesses, envisioned an almost divine role for the daguerreotype—that its material and pictorial properties could contribute to a broader cultural project to recover proof of and to promote the validity of the nation’s providential origins and divine mission. Whitman declared himself devoted to “what is real about America”—to the people whose diversity of skills were literally constructing the nation in their image. This lecture draws on the photographs featured in “Containing Multitudes” to explore the omissions and legacies of visions such as Whitman’s, and the ways practitioners have envisioned and interpreted their truths about America and its promise.
Makeda Best is the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California Art (OMCA), where she leads the Curatorial, Production, Design, and Collections Departments. A photography scholar, Best’s most recent exhibition, “American Job: 1940–2011,” was shown at the International Center for Photography, New York in 2025. Best formerly served as the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions, including “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970” and “Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America.” Her curatorial practice centers on photography, documentary, history, social change, and expanding representation within museum collections. A widely published scholar and award-winning educator, she is the author of Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th Century America and recipient of the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture Photography Catalogue of the Year Award.