Current Exhibits
Special Exhibits:
It All Adds Up: Adding Machines & Calculators
Spirits & Cocktails in the Bay Area: A Mini History
Get That Modern Style: Hairstyling Tools of the 19th & 20th Centuries
Main Exhibit:
The Times That Changed Us: Technology & American Identity During Crises of the 19th & 20th Centuries
This exhibition traces five defining American crises—the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement—to argue that American identity has never been fixed. It has been repeatedly remade in moments of national trial. Each crisis forced Americans to renegotiate the boundaries of citizenship, the state’s obligations to its people, and the meaning of “American.”
Technology both drove these upheavals and exposed their human cost: from Civil War battlefield photography to Depression-era documentary portraits to televised Civil Rights protests, the camera especially turned private suffering into public reckoning, making injustice visible enough to demand change. Taken together, the exhibit’s five crises reveal a nation perpetually rebuilding itself under pressure, and the journey culminates by asking visitors to locate themselves in that unfinished story: what does it mean to be American right now?
Technostalgia, featuring Nemo Gould
July 25th - September 27th
“Chairman of the hoard” and fine artist Nemo Gould spotlights the crossover between inventor and artist in Technostalgia, a special exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage (MOAH). Technostalgia showcases Gould’s signature kinetic sculptures, which give new life to found objects and vintage technology as interactive art via Gould’s mechanical engineering. Visitors will experience Gould’s pieces juxtaposed with MOAH’s pre-digital-era tech artifacts in their original state to illustrate the connection between the technological ingenuity of the past and present. Taken together—the past inventor’s product and the present artist’s rendering—Technostalgia encapsulates the beauty, the fancy, and the imagination of technological innovation.