| The San Bernardino County Museum is pleased to present “Chinese Pioneers: Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs.” This temporary exhibit explores the social, political and judicial disenfranchisement of Chinese Californians — as well as moments of Chinese agency and resilience — in the decades before and after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The exhibit, on view from Mar. 21 to July 26, 2026, examines how photography played a potent role in both Chinese people’s interactions with the dominant culture and in the government’s fledgling systems of registration, identification and surveillance.The exhibit begins in the Gold Rush era, when large numbers of Chinese immigrants arrived in California. Anti-Chinese sentiment led to protests, violence and vigilante expulsions up and down the West Coast. The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming citizens and tightened restrictions on previous residents seeking to reenter the country. It is against this backdrop that the exhibit considers the broad range of nineteenth-century imagery depicting the first generations of Chinese Californians and how visual culture influenced, aligned with and diverged from the politics of Exclusion and the actions of the state. |
