Opening reception: Saturday, August 15, 2-6pm
Please RSVP to mail@belami.info to attend the opening reception. You will receive the address with on-site parking, as well as suggested activities and accommodations in the area. If you’re unable to attend the opening but would like to book a viewing appointment, please email events@ragculture.org. For more information on RAG Cultural Center, visit www.ragculture.org.
Bel Ami cordially invites you to the inaugural opening of the RAG Cultural Center with an exhibition by Ben Sakoguchi, entitled What Was America. Featuring selected works created between the 1990s and the present day, this presentation honors an artist with close ties to the California landscape and its history. Located at Rancho Arroyo Grande (RAG)—a historic, 3,500-acre ranch and vineyard ten miles inland from the Pacific coast—RAG Cultural Center is an interdisciplinary non-profit advancing transformative cultural production by supporting marginalized creative practices, fostering inclusive community partnerships, and encouraging diverse cultural exchange.
Ben Sakoguchi is renowned for his ongoing series of Orange Crate Label paintings, which co-opt the iconic advertising language of vintage California orange crates to transmit the artist’s wry, discerning commentary on politics, culture, and history. Since the 1970s, Sakoguchi has produced hundreds of works in the Orange Crate Label series: each painting is the same size with a roughhewn pine frame, and includes a brand name, an image of an orange, and an illustration of a historic person or event. In spite of the series’ rigid parameters, an extraordinary variety of topics and concerns have entered Sakoguchi’s schema, from acerbic portrayals of politicians and institutions, to lighthearted riffs on aeronautic inventions and art historical masterworks.
Sakoguchi’s unique satirical style springs from an early awareness of racial inequality under American capitalism. In 1942, when he was just three years old, he and his family were ordered from their San Bernardino home and grocery store, and sent to the Poston Internment Camp in Arizona. After the war, Sakoguchi would go on to receive an MFA from UCLA and exhibit his work in galleries and institutions while teaching art at Pasadena City College, but his family’s imprisonment left an indelible impression on his worldview, inspiring a prolific career devoted to articulating a nuanced picture of history.
The works in this exhibition retrace the canonical American dream, drawing in accounts of racism and violent massacres, as well as remarkable stories of under-recognized heroes who overcame adversity and discrimination to protect human rights, invent new technologies, and develop novel modes of expression.
Sakoguchi’s vivid pictorial chronicles invite visitors to reflect on the overlapping and contested histories of Rancho Arroyo Grande itself—a site of indigenous belonging, colonial dispossession, agricultural and real estate privatization, and environmental conservation. Sprawling across the coastal mountain range between Lake Lopez and Los Padres National Forest, the Rancho’s complex background and rich biodiversity inform its future path toward repair and sustainability.
In January 2027, a major retrospective devoted to Ben Sakoguchi’s career as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor will open at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at University of California, Santa Barbara. The exhibition will travel to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Ben Sakoguchi (b. 1938, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Pasadena. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gasworks, London (2025); Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2025); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024 & 2021); Ortuzar, New York (2023 & 2020); Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris (2023); POTTS, Alhambra (2018); Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (2016); The Alternative Museum, New York (1992); and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1980), among others. His work is included in numerous public collections including Brooklyn Museum, New York; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.