In Space Time: Dewey Crumpler

4 March - 29 April 2023
Overview
Dewey Crumpler, Beige Pop, 2022
Dewey Crumpler, Beige Pop, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, March 4, 2023, 3:00-5:00 pm

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Fransisco

 

ARTIST TALK

Saturday, March 4, 2023, 4:00 - 5:00pm. 

 

Dewey Crumpler will be joined by the Executive Director of the BAMPFA, Julie Rodrigues-Widholm, for a discussion on Crumpler's practice and cultural significance.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Dewey Crumpler's work titled In Space Time. 

 

In Space Time represents a component of a four-part, 30-year exploration of an object. The form is an inner expression of the Hoodie Figures that derived from Crumpler’s original form of a Slave Collar. All of Dewey Crumpler’s series from the past 30 years thematically join to examine how the Slave Collar can hold the shape of the accompanying memories and history of the object - the shadow of the collar representing cyclical time. For Crumpler, the void within the collar is a site of potentiality. Memories surrounding Blackness shapeshift through space and time. By using abstraction and repetition, Crumpler illustrates the continuity of these symbolic forms. Crumpler describes the idea of void within the collar forms as Blackness, but in Blackness is light, all colors–the form is metaphysical. There is an energy in the darkness, and Crumpler's work reveals the potentiality of what was once seen as void.

 

Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) is a contemporary artist living and working in the Bay Area. He examines issues of globalization and cultural commodification through his paintings, videos, and sculptures. Dewey Crumpler was an Associate Professor of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts. Recent exhibitions include Dewey Crumpler: Crossings at the Richmond Art Center, a 15-year survey including over 120 of his works. He is in the permanent collections of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, and the Triton Museum of Art, CA. 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.  Crumpler lives and works in Berkeley and San Francisco, CA.
 

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is currently the executive director of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) where she leads a strategic vision centered on transformational learning, community building, and institutional change through art and film. Prior to BAMPFA, Rodrigues Widholm was director and chief curator at DePaul Art Museum (2015–20) where she launched a multi-year Latinx Initiative and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago (1999–2015). As a curator of global contemporary art, she authored more than 25 publications and organized more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions presented at museums across the United States including BAMPFA, DePaul Art Museum, MCA Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Nasher Sculpture Center, among others.

Works
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