Fertile Ground. Mission Scene

Fertile Ground. Designed to bring together the dichotomous arena of the formal gallery setting with the avant garde genre of contemporary art. The audience entering the space experiences both the formalities of a traditional gallery setting—white walls; hardwood, polished floors; brilliant, neutral lighting—alongside the rather unconventional media of communal art.

The space itself is divided into multiple sections, but most notably along a diagonal line which conveys the audience either along a left or right trajectory. To the right the viewer comes face-to-face with the provocative section of Fertile Ground featuring art from the Mission Scene. Mission Scene attempts to reconcile the growing and ever evolving genre of street art with the formal museum setting.

The most notable piece of this particular selection is Barry McGee's Untitled (pictured above), which sits like brilliant feathered parrot alongside a string of pigeons atop a telephone wire. Unconnected. Out of place. Disrupted. While the piece itself is quite engaging and invites the audience to interact—its bulging, amorphous shape spilling out into the space of the audience—the space in which the piece sits appears to encourage the opposite.

Unfortunate for the theme of the exhibit, the art showcased in Fertile Ground and specifically Mission Scene do not successfully convey the properties, presence, and feeling of street art or even communal art. This stems less from the installation of pieces like Barry McGee's and more from the simple fact that curators have yet to successfully integrate the context necessary to understanding and appreciating street art in its entirety into the museum setting. The disjunction felt in this particular exhibit further brings to mind the simple question of whether or not street art remains street art once removed from the street. Can a communal mural still evoke the same responses in a formal museum setting as it does on a street corner?

While the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) has indeed attempted to reconcile this unconventional medium with the decorum of the museum, the perceptible frustration created by the lack of correspondence between space and art deters the audience from deeming the exhibit "successful." Sentiments such as these bring to mind questions that need to be addressed if curators such as those of Fertile Ground—Drew Johnson and René de Guzman—want to ever successfully showcase street art in the gallery setting.

Fertile Ground is on exhibit at OMCA until 12 April 2015.