If the Museum of the African Diaspora were presenting only the single painting Breach, I would still tell you to go see Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages. It’s that compelling.
Yes, this is the man who taught Deborah Roberts, Rozeal and Kehinde Wiley at the San Francisco Art Institute, but somehow we’ve had to wait two decades since his last major solo museum show. Since there are three floors of artworks covering five decades of the 77-year-old Bay Area legend’s practice, you won’t want to further delay your visit to this show.
Breach, one in a series of shipping container paintings, crashes present and past together, refusing to let us rest in pleasant fictions that modernity has somehow laid historic catastrophes to rest. Please go see the metallic copper leaf in person. It both darkens the sky like a storm and shines like a miracle being born. Copper, a conduit of electricity and a valuable commodity, floods from the sky into the turbulent waters churned by dozens of acid-colored shipping containers. Among them, ghostly figures — so easy to miss in a small digital reproduction — swim. Were they unleashed by the containers falling open or were they preexisting spirits activated by the disorder?
