Sep 27, 2019 – Jan 18, 2020
Curated by Sandra S. Phillips
Discovering the work of Michael Jang at the MFA was this year’s most unexpected gift, four decades of exhilarating, rarely seen photographs spanning street photography in San Francisco, celebrity shots in Beverly Hills (accessed via faked press credentials), documents of Bay Area punk and garage band scenes across the years, and fabulous family portraits. Jang’s photographs of his own extended Chinese-American family, suburban Californians as familiar and wonderfully strange as all families, are evocative time capsules of seventies America, complete with lively-printed pantsuits, MAD magazine, and misshapen soda bottles alongside an electric rice cooker and “Chong Imports” wall calendar. In other words, America as it really is and always was. —BQ