08/18/2026
COMING SOON to MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA—Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages.
The first major museum exhibition to frame the continuity of Crumpler's artistic and philosophical practice through this sonic logic, Sonic Lineages approaches more than five decades of his work as a composition: ideas recur, forms echo across time, and repetition produces variation. The exhibition brings paintings from multiple periods into relation with newly realized kinetic works.
Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) has called the Bay Area home for most of his life—his practice began here as a city muralist, studying under Pablo Esteban O'Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and grew into a body of work now held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, the Triton Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum, and featured in the Tate Modern's 2017 Soul of a Nation. For decades, Crumpler also taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where his students included Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts.
The "sonic" here is not exclusive to sound. Rhythm, repetition, variation, improvisation, and duration shape the exhibition. Shipping containers, hoodies, voids, metallic surfaces, and moving forms appear, disappear, and return across decades as Crumpler investigates Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory, and time.
At its center is Crumpler's conception of "absolute autonomy": the capacity of forms and ideas to remain fluid, entering new relationships without surrendering their integrity. Like a musical phrase, a form can be repeated, varied, improvised upon, and brought into relation with others while retaining its own voice.
On view September 30, 2026 – May 30, 2027. Curated by Key Jo Lee.
Learn more and plan your visit today: https://www.moadsf.org/exhibitions/dewey-crumpler-sonic-lineages
