Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) examines themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression within mixed media. Crumpler began his practice as city as a muralist, studying under Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In the late 1960s, when San Francisco’s George Washington High School’s mural “Life of Washington” was under fire from African American students, a young Crumpler was tapped to create new murals in response. His paintings, an iconic triptych of murals called Multi-Ethnic Heritage, are still at the school. After over a decade of working as a muralist, he began to address slavery in America.

In one extensive body of work, Crumpler used 'Metta' forms through painting and sculpture. The tulip, like Black bodies, was subjugated, marginalized, and turned into an economic commodity. The shackle form, originally an African dance instrument associated with joy and power, was manipulated into a rigid tool of oppression by slave owners. Through Buddhist transcendence, he uses shackles as a metaphor for the mind resisting oppression. Crumpler states "while the shackles were on the Africans, the Africans were never in the shackles."