Well, the rain is back. Looking for an indoor activity to while away the weeks ahead? Good thing there’s plenty of art to see in San Francisco this month. From exhibitions by two legendary local painters to a group show raising the question of how art itself can offer a spiritual experience, here are five shows to check out in The City right now.
Dewey Crumpler: “In Space Time”
When I first saw Dewey Crumpler’s “Hoodie” paintings in 2021, it was like stepping into another dimension. This surreal world — which includes floating hoodies driving flying sneaker cars — is one that reflects our own social landscape, while offering a deft critique through a language of visual metaphor, specifically the image of the disembodied hoodie and the shadow it casts, the shape of which evokes a slave collar. Now the painter, whose murals have long graced The City, returns to Jenkins Johnson gallery for “In Space Time,” a solo exhibition of his paintings from the last 30 years, further exploring the visual emblem of the slave collar, especially how its circular form might relate to cyclical time, both in the Hoodie paintings and beyond, encompassing semi-abstract paintings of the repeating cyclical form, a meditation on Blackness and history and the potential future that comes from the void at the center of the circular motif.
