The de Young museum presents Isaac Julien: I Dream a World
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the “Fine Arts Museums”) published their press release announcing Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, the first US retrospective of Isaac Julien.
Over the past 25 years, Isaac Julien has developed a singular, choreographic style of moving image exhibition in the form of immersive multichannel film and video installations. Distinguished by their compelling fusion of fact and fiction, social critique, and aesthetic immersion, Julien’s works offer poetic reflections on political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals and societies around the world—especially for those on the margins of power.
Featuring 10 major video installations made across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas between 1999 and 2022 plus early films, I Dream a World is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a US museum setting and the largest exhibition focusing on Julien’s film and video installation works to date.
“Isaac Julien is one of the most influential voices in visual culture, Black cultural studies, and queer independent cinema working today, and we are honored to present his first US retrospective at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums. “In groundbreaking works such as Lessons of the Hour (2019), which we were privileged to acquire in 2023, Julien engages with the urgent social issues of our time and invites viewers to rethink the dominant historical narratives of the global north.”
Whether centering historical moments such as the first American-led expedition to reach the North Pole in 1908-09, or the often fateful but ongoing migration of North African refugees across the Mediterranean Sea, Julien’s subjects are never locked in one time or place. The same is true for his portraits of individuals like abolitionist Frederick Douglass and architect Lina Bo Bardi, or his subversive address of cultural institutions like Hollywood and the Museum as arbiters and archives of social ideals, constructs, and hierarchies of the West.
“Favoring nonlinear narrative techniques such as reiteration, reflection, and transposition in his orchestration of images and sounds across multiple screens, Julien folds the past onto the present and the present onto the past. In each work, Julien weaves different temporalities, ideas, and imaginations into substantiations of a multi-dimensional selfhood that is not merely in, but of this world. In doing so he allows history and memory to emerge as intimate and desirous visions of a way of being,” remarked Claudia Schmuckli, organizing curator and Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Museums.
The first major exhibition at the Fine Arts Museums dedicated entirely to an artist working with the moving image in the form of multiscreen video installations, I Dream a World will start with Julien’s groundbreaking films Looking for Langston (1989), which gave definition to the genre of New Queer Cinema, Lost Boundaries (1981-87) and This Is Not An Aids Advertisement (1987). Unfolding through the de Young’s Herbst Special Exhibition galleries, the installations will be grouped according to their thematic resonance and connected through a central nave featuring archival materials.
The installations on view include Baltimore (2003), A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), Western Union: Small Boats (2007), Lessons of the Hour (2019) - a recent FAMSF acquisition, The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), Paradise Omeros (2002), True North (2004), Fantôme Afrique (2005), concluding with Julien’s most recent work Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022). Ten Thousand Waves (2010) will be on view in Wilsey Court, one of the de Young’s free public spaces.
Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Opening April 12, 2025 at the de Young museum, the exhibition will run through July 13, 2025.
