Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents Bay Area artist Dewey Crumpler: Exploration of Two Objects a solo exhibition of a four-part, thirty-year expression of tulips and the slave collar/Metta forms through, painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage. The tulip, like Black bodies, was subjugated, marginalized, and turned into an economic commodity. The shackle form, originally an African dance instrument associated with joy and power, was manipulated into a rigid tool of oppression by slave owners. Through Buddhist transcendence, he uses shackles as a metaphor for the mind resisting oppression. Crumpler states “while the shackles were on the Africans, the Africans were never in the shackles.”
Crumpler is Associate Professor Emeritus of Painting, San Francisco Art Institute where his students have included artists Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco. His work is in museums including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; DeYoung Museum; Oakland Museum of California; California African American Museum; and Triton Museum of Art. Digital images of his murals were included in the 2017 Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation. He has received many awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant.
