California Dreaming

Palazzo Strozzi presents California Dreaming, a major exhibition dedicated to California through works by artists from the 1960s to the present day. The exhibition, organized with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, CA, explores the appeal and contradictions of a place that has become a symbol of modernity and success, poised between myth and reality, utopia and disillusionment.

The project creates an intergenerational dialogue between historic figures and contemporary voices, bringing together artists who were born or have worked in California, or whose practice is deeply connected to its cultural context. David Hockney, James Turrell, Judy Chicago, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Mike Kelley and Catherine Opie are presented in dialogue with leading figures from the contemporary art scene, including Sadie Barnette, Alex Israel, Patrick Martinez, Lauren Halsey and Refik Anadol.

The exhibition explores California’s many different imaginaries: hedonism and political activism, popular culture and new technologies, car culture and vast natural and urban landscapes, individualism and the diversity of its communities and identities. Featuring loans from international museums and collections alongside new works produced for the occasion, California Dreaming brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and installations, transforming the whole of Palazzo Strozzi into a single exhibition project extending across the Piano Nobile, Courtyard and Project Space.

Long perceived as a “promised land”, an elsewhere where anything seems possible, California has generated phenomena that have profoundly transformed contemporary society and culture. From the rise of Hollywood as a factory of the global imagination to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, from the civil rights movements to the emergence of Silicon Valley, California has represented—and continues to represent—a laboratory for cultural and social transformations with a global impact. Yet behind this image lies a coexistence of profoundly different geographies, identities and experiences: coastlines and deserts, cities and suburbs, vast infrastructures and natural landscapes, a plurality of communities and cultures, and histories of migration, inequality and social tension. The myth of a place offering unlimited possibilities thus emerges as an ambivalent construction, suspended between desire and disillusionment, emancipation and marginalisation, beauty and dystopia.

California Dreaming investigates the ways in which artists have helped to construct—and, at the same time, to challenge—the imaginary of the Golden State. Art becomes a means of examining the distance between myth and reality and of interpreting cultural, political and social dynamics that extend far beyond California’s borders, offering a broader reflection on the aspirations and contradictions of contemporary society.