In 2022-2023, UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative and Future Histories Lab will sponsor a series of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses using Angel Island’s historic immigration station as a jumping-off point for discussion about race in America, global migration, and architectures of incarceration. We’ll use the arts, design, and historical and landscape interpretation to understand current events and envision better futures.
Angel Island is an important observatory from which to consider American stories of immigration, exclusion, and belonging. It occupies a prominent spot in San Francisco Bay and its immigration station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.” But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for hundreds of thousands of newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia.
Today, Angel Island holds important lessons about the history of racism in California and the U.S. At a time of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, anti-Asian violence across the country, and refugee crises around the globe, the ongoing legacy of Angel Island needs to be examined.
Music, theater, dance, poetry, and visual arts can help us ask: Who belongs? Who is included? How is history embedded in our stories, in the landscape, the built environment, and in our bodies? How can the arts, storytelling, and new technologies help individuals and communities reclaim their past and imagine the future?
A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; American Studies; Architecture; City and Regional Planning; and History. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
Stay updated on events, performances and courses from A Year on Angel Island: