Dewey Crumpler

Overview
Dewey Crumpler, Untitled 71, 1997
Dewey Crumpler, Untitled 71, 1997
Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) is a Bay Area artist and educator creating surreal experiences that merge traditional painting techniques with video, mixed media and sculpture. His work examines themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression, which continue to transcend boundaries. Crumpler has long been preoccupied with how objects serve as sites for exploring what it means to be Black, shedding light on the aesthetic freedom that contributes to Black liberation.
 
In one extensive body of work, spanning over three decades Crumpler explores the energetic power of the tulip. This exploration began when he was on a trip to Amsterdam- he became inspired by the fields of tulips, and the singularity and resilience of the flower. Crumpler was attached to the physicality of the tulip, its simultaneous fulness and emptiness, as well as to its relationship to space. He recognized the flowers expression and used it as a vehicle that could translate emotional quality that lay within his paintings and permitted him to explore the forces of nature he was drawn to. Crumpler began to draw upon its diasporic nature of being spread across the world to the commodification of black bodies. Much like Africans, both of which were taken out of their original environment and shipped around the world and therefore transformed. Contemporary African Americans stand as enduring survivors of the peculiar institution of slavery; similarly, the tulip symbolizes resistance and is one of the most resilient flowers, maintaining its physical integrity amidst extreme climate conditions. With these subtle metaphors, Crumpler addresses the idea of subjugation in America and the way this condition was transformed into a state of cultural self-fulfillment and spiritual development.
 
Crumpler was an Associate Professor of Painting of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts. His practice began as a city muralist, studying under the late Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His work is included in permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, CA; and the California African American Museum. 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. Recent exhibitions include Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies at the Dr. David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Avant-Garde: Those Ahead of Their Time at Jenkins Johnson Gallery. He has a forthcoming retrospective at the Museum of African Diaspora (MOAD) in 2026, curated by Key Joe Lee as well as People Make This Place: SFAI Stories, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opening July 2025.
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