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.
Featured in the exhibit are examples of how different types of photography (studio portraits, street photography and surveillance) reflect different facets of the Chinese experience. While studio portraits presented a dignified image of the subject, street photography highlighted the unequal social relations that existed between the Chinese and non-Chinese populations. Government headshots were used as a tool in the suppression, surveillance and criminalization of Chinese residents through systems of registration and identification. Together, these varying styles of photography shaped the perception of the Chinese during the Exclusion Era.
Exhibition Support “Chinese Pioneers” is an exhibit by the California Historical Society and touring through Exhibit Envoy. Institutional support is provided by San Francisco Grants for the Arts and Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. The Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation supported the first six bookings of this exhibition.
About the California Historical Society Headquartered in San Francisco, with support from California Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, Yerba Buena Community Benefit District and all of its donors and members across the state, the nonprofit organization works statewide to inspire and empower people to make California’s past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives.
The California Historical Society (CHS), the official state historical society of California, has been collecting, sharing and honoring the extraordinarily diverse stories from throughout the state for 150 years.
About Exhibit Envoy Exhibit Envoy provides traveling exhibitions and professional services to museums throughout California. For more information, visit www.exhibitenvoy.org.