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Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) is a Bay Area artist and educator creating surreal experiences that merge traditional painting techniques with video, mixed media and sculpture. His work examines themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression, which continue to transcend boundaries. Crumpler has long been preoccupied with how objects serve as sites for exploring what it means to be Black, shedding light on the aesthetic freedom that contributes to Black liberation. Crumpler’s body of work addresses the idea of subjugation in America and the way this condition was transformed into a state of cultural self-fulfillment and spiritual development.

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Crumpler was an Associate Professor of Painting of the San Francisco ArtInstitute, where he taught Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts. His practice began as a city muralist, studying under the late Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His work is included in permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, CA; and the California African American Museum. Digital images of his murals were included in the 2017 Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a Flintridge Foundation Award, and the Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship Eureka Award. Recent exhibitions include Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies at the Dr. David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, and The Avant-Garde: Those Ahead of Their Time at Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

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About the Exhibition

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Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages is the first major museum exhibition to reveal the remarkable continuity of Crumpler’s artistic and philosophical practice across more than five decades. Bringing together paintings from multiple periods with newly commissioned kinetic works, the exhibition traces an artist whose deepest questions have remained alive, changing shape as the world around them changes.

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Crumpler approaches painting as a way of thinking. Shipping containers, hooded figures, voids, metallic surfaces, and moving forms carry his investigations into Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory, and time. Paintings created decades apart speak across the galleries, allowing earlier ideas to gather new meaning through proximity, reflection, movement, and light.

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At the center of Sonic Lineages is Crumpler’s proposition that Black consciousness transforms time and space. Some works have developed over years, even decades, reflecting his belief that a painting should enter the world only when it has realized its full possibilities. Time becomes part of the material. Looking becomes an active encounter.

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Visitors will experience an exhibition that shifts as they move through it. Reflections change, kinetic works activate, and relationships gradually surface. Sonic Lineages rewards attention and return, offering a rare opportunity to encounter one of the Bay Area’s most influential living artists in the full depth of his practice. It asks what becomes visible when we give art, and ourselves, the time to keep looking.

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