The mixed-reality Ohlone cultural exhibit “Yuutka” opened to the public Sunday at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, completing a project that the Trump administration tried to halt by freezing its congressionally approved federal grant. The opening followed an April ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco who found the administration’s funding freeze likely unconstitutional and ordered the National Science Foundation to release the $450,000 award.
Inside the museum, visitors enter a space where replicas of black oak trees rise overhead and digital projections of California poppies, wild roses, yarrow, and black sage sweep across the floor. A cartoon depiction of the late East Bay Ohlone matriarch Dolores Lameira guides children through a virtual acorn-gathering exercise using baskets fitted with 3D sensors. A creek and footbridge under construction during the final installation week were completed in time for the opening.
The exhibit, whose Ohlone-language name means “The Place of the Acorn,” is the first mixed-reality display in the Lawrence’s history and the first designed in partnership with young members of the Ohlone community. An advisory board of Ohlone youth shaped the content, language, and cultural protocols embedded throughout the experience.
“It’s always important to think about the power that comes from the community, and that’s happening here,” said Vincent Medina, one of the project’s creators and a descendant of Lameira, the matriarch whose likeness appears in the exhibit. Medina said seeing his great-aunt’s animated figure made the installation feel authentic: “It really looks like her.”
The grant that funded Yuutka was awarded in 2023 by the National Science Foundation as part of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which supports science education in museums and community settings. In early 2025, the Trump administration froze the funding alongside thousands of other grants as part of a sweeping executive action targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the federal government.
The University of California sued. In an April 2026 ruling, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin held that the administration’s freeze likely violated the First Amendment. The judge found the government was punishing UC Berkeley based on its perceived ideological viewpoint, a form of compelled speech that required strict scrutiny under the Constitution. Lin also noted that the administration had failed to produce any evidence linking the exhibit to a DEI mandate — the NSF had classified it as a science-education project when it was awarded.
“The team never stopped working on the exhibit,” said Rachel Zaentz, senior director of development at the Lawrence Hall of Science. “The importance of the work remained the same.”
The legal victory cleared the way for the museum to install the exhibit on schedule. Over the opening weekend, roughly 2,500 people visited, according to museum tallies. The institution occupies land that is part of the ancestral territory of the Ohlone people, a fact the exhibit foregrounds by grounding its interactive technology in traditional ecological knowledge — acorn gathering, seasonal plant cycles, and the cultural practice of tending the land.
The case is one of the first successful court challenges to the administration’s use of grant freezes to enforce ideological tests on science and education funding. The ruling did not address the broader legality of the executive orders themselves, but it established that withholding funds already appropriated by Congress as a penalty for a perceived viewpoint runs afoul of the First Amendment when the government cannot connect the funding to the conduct it says it is targeting.