Dewey Crumpler

Dewey Crumpler has long been preoccupied with the ways in which objects can be sites of exploration for what it means to be African American. One day in the mid-1990s, while out on his daily walk, he was transfixed by a tower of colorful steel shipping containers stacked at the Port of Oakland in California. To him, the looming rectangular structures were mysterious and foreboding. He saw them as monumental metaphors of the geopolitical power that moved goods across space and time, possessing the history of commerce and oppression in their hidden cavernous interiors. Compelled by a fascination with this form and its shadow, he began to sketch and paint the crates daily. “Dewey Crumpler: Crossings,” his exhibition here, showcased 122 of these prophetic images, which he began making roughly twenty-five years before the collapse of the shipping industry brought on by the pandemic. Vibrant dreamscapes were weighted with the gravitas of their subject matter: mass migration, globalization, and the tangled yoke of capitalism within the Black diaspora.

 

When Crumpler started as a young artist in San Francisco in the 1960s, he couldn’t find any art in the museums that portrayed Black life. As a result, he sought inspiration from an eclectic array of sources, among them European art, coffee-table books on African American art and culture, the work of social-realist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (which he got to see in person during a trip to Mexico), and the improvisational sounds of jazz greats including John Coltrane and Miles Davis. By establishing a practice that focused on a specific object for an extended period, Crumpler was able to ground the panoply of influences he brought to each body of work.