Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Magnolia, Arkansas) works feature vibrant colors and layers of various materials that create surreal work through digital imagery, video, mixed media, sculpture, and traditional painting techniques. Examining themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression, Crumpler brings to light the malleability that leads to empowerment and liberation. Simultaneously, his work reflects and examines our socio-political landscape, globalization, and cultural commodification.

Crumpler examines contemporary capitalism and the shipping industry with its connections to the Transatlantic slave trade. He renders nautical vessels, shipping pallets, and containers that flit between abstraction and representation. Crumpler employs the container ship as a visual symbol to probe the long history of the world’s oceans to facilitate change. The display of colorful rectangular boxes filled with goods stacked in perfect symmetry are destined for exotic ports dotting the coastlines of every major city throughout the world. The uniformity of the shipping ports and their systems of operations become structures of authority and monuments of economic and cultural power. The oceans and the ships traversing them have played a central role in the transporting of human bodies and the dissemination of ideas and influences for millennia.