Curator’s Tour - Makeda Best on 'American Job: 1940-2011'

Join Makeda Best, guest curator of American Job: 1940–2011, and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, for a guided walking tour of American Job.

About the Exhibition

American Job: 1941-2011 surveys the photographic response to labor organizing and strike activity, race and gender discrimination in labor, organized labor’s role in politics, labor and activism, and the intersection of labor and the social changes wrought by the economic restructurings of the twentieth century.

Makeda Best is an award-winning curator and scholar specializing in American photography. Her previous exhibitions include Please Stay Home: Darrel Ellis in Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan and Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University); and Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970 (Harvard Art Museums). Her most recent curatorial project was Framing Freedom: The Harriet Hayden Albums, exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum in 2024. With Kevin Moore, she curated the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial exhibition On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs, writing on topics ranging from vernacular soldier photography and Ben Shahn’s images of smalltown commercial districts to Imogen Cunningham, Bettye Saar, environmental photobooks and photography and the Black Arts Movement. Her scholarly writing includes Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th Century America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). She lives in the Bay Area, where she oversees the curatorial, collections management and production departments in her capacity as Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, in addition to working on her book projects. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Studio Photography.