NOW ON EXHIBIT- CAAM, Expositions Park

Witness as California African American Museum opens exhibit on “For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers in California”, on display until October 30.

Buffalo Soldiers have been mythologized in movies, television programs, and popular songs. Despite this romanticism, the history of Buffalo Soldiers is complex, and their stories are relevant and worthy of deeper understanding.

For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers in California explores the surprising history surrounding all-Black US Army regiments whose members—both in and out of uniform—left powerful traces in the Golden State. Venturing beyond myths, the exhibition confronts the role of Black soldiers in the Army’s history of violence against Native American people, explores historical debates in the Black community over participation in wars, and exposes cracks in a society permeated by racism, in which African American soldiers faced the searing conflict between commitment to equality for their people and to the country they chose to serve. Such is the “double life” African Americans live, in the words of scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, including in the armed forces.

Through artifacts, audio interviews, photographs, historical records, period uniforms, newspapers, musical scores, and media representations, the exhibition presents a sweeping narrative of Black soldiers and their families who made California home during the era of government-sanctioned racial segregation in the US military. For Race and Country highlights Californians, from Northern California to the Mexican border, whose little-known influence transformed the state, and the nation.

For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers in California is curated by Susan D. Anderson, history curator, with consultant Anthony J. Powell and researcher Caroline Collins.

CAAM recently interviewed Susan D. Anderson and Anthony Powell about this exhibition:

600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California 90037

FREE! TUES – SUNDAY- Exposition Park

The California African American Museum (CAAM) focuses on enrichment and education on the cultural heritage and history of African Americans with a focus on California and western United States.

Admission is free to all visitors. The California African American Museum’s mission is to research, collect, preserve, and interpret for public enrichment the history, art, and culture of African Americans with an emphasis on California and the western United States.

CAAM’s permanent collection consists of over 4,000 objects ranging from the 1800s to the present. It encompasses paintings, photographs, film, sculpture, historical documents, and artifacts, and it spans nineteenth-century landscape paintings to modern artworks to contemporary mixed-media reflections on cultural and political events.

The Museum’s first acquisitions included a bronze bust of civil rights activist Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune by artist Richmond Barthé and a sculpture by artist Maren Hassinger, then at the start of her career. These laid the perfect groundwork for CAAM’s mandate to assemble a comprehensive, thoughtful, and wide-reaching collection.

CAAM’s deepest holdings include art made or connected to African Americans in California and the western United States. However, the Museum also has significant works of contemporary art from the African diaspora (including Haiti, Brazil, and Jamaica), as well as traditional African art from Western, Central, and Sub-Saharan Africa. CAAM aims to represent the diverse contributions of African Americans in the United States, but also to interpret how the past has affected identity in the present.

Today, CAAM oversees, exhibits, and conserves a rapidly growing collection. Each quarter, curators review the current holdings and decide as a committee on future acquisitions. We view our collection as a living body — constantly evolving, growing, and reflecting the world in which we live.

Some examples of CAAM’s collection include the Walter Burrell Collection of audio recordings of Burrell’s interviews with African American celebrities, broadcast by a local radio station in the early 1970s; the oral histories of Celes King, who was both a local civil rights activist as well as a former Tuskegee airman; and selections from the collection of visual artist John Outterbridge.

Hours

Monday: Closed
Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00am – 5:00pm
Sunday: 11:00am – 5:00pm

For additional information, visit the website @

caamuseum.org/exhibitions

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