On view: December 5, 2025—March 7, 2026

In There is No Angel on Angel Island: Joanna Tam, the erased history of the Angel Island Immigration Station is examined and makes connections to current anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies in the United States. The photographs in the exhibition were taken using a pinhole camera that Tam made specifically for her Visibility Garment. She put her pinhole camera into the pocket of her garment, stood still, and exposed the photo paper. The haunting and surreal atmosphere in the pictures speaks to the nature of the immigration station, which is a site of segregation, discrimination, and dehumanization. This project is part of Tam’s larger body of work, Visibility Studies, which unpacks the meaning of hypervisibility, invisibility, and safety for folx whose identities do not align with societal norms.

Angel Island is the ancestral land of the Coast Miwok people. From 1910 to 1940, the immigration station on this island in the San Francisco Bay had processed immigrants from over eighty countries. While the processing time for Europeans was typically a couple of days, Asians had experienced a much longer period of detention. Chinese immigrants, in particular, were often detained for weeks and months. Angel Island had also served as a U.S. military installation. Nowadays, it is a popular destination for hiking and camping.

In partnership with California State Parks, the Angel Island Immigration Foundation manages and preserves the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Tam encourages you to learn more about and to support the work of the Angel Island Immigration Foundation by visiting their website at www.aiisf.org.

Joanna Tam is a Hong Kong-born visual artist who lives and works on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, and the Massachusett People, also known as Boston. Her interdisciplinary practice examines migration, the construction of national identity, the idea of safety, and one’s connection to places through video, photography, performance, installation, and community engagement. Tam is the recipient of the 2024 Prilla Smith Brackett Award (presented by Davis Museum at the Wellesley College), the 2024 Collective Futures Fund’s Sustaining Practice Grant, and the 2020 SMFA Traveling Fellowship.

Tam’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include American Studies 2019 at the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University; Visibility Studies at Regis College Fine Arts Center; Wasenstraße Story at Chrom VI in Idar-Oberstein, Germany; Let’s Story at the Boston Children’s Museum; and American Studies at the Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College, Troy NY. She has been invited to attend artist residencies at Kala Art Institute, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Boston Center for the Arts, the Boston Children’s Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, and Wedding Cake House. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Art Review, Artscope, and Emergency Index. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.