On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, at 11.30 a.m. Joseph Gallivan interviews Claudia Schmuckli, the Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Schmuckli talks about the show called “I Dream a World” which is the first US survey of Sir Isaac Julien’s experimental filmmaking, ranging from 1999 to 2023. She discusses his use of collage, his progression to multi-channel video, and the themes of queerness, otherness and immigration that run through all his films. She discusses “True North”, “Paradise Omeros” (2002), “Ten Thousand Waves” (2010) about the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England, “Baltimore” and “Looking for Langston.”
“I Dream a World” is on now at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, through July 13, 2025.
From the press release:
https://www.famsf.org/press-room/isaac-julien
Over the last 25 years, pioneering artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (b. 1960, London) has created immersive, multichannel video installations. Celebrated for his poetic visual narratives, Julien explores power, politics, and personal experience through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside select early single-channel films including his iconic Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum setting and his first retrospective in the United States. The works’ themes range from global migration to the collection and appropriation of African artists and art by Western museums to the celebration of cultural figures who overcame racial oppression. Shot across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Asia, Julien’s works untangle the complex web of post-colonial conditions that has shaped the lives of individuals and societies across the globe.
Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is on view in Wilsey Court — one of the de Young’s free public spaces.
The 10 video installations in I Dream a World cover subjects that range from masculinity and cowboys in the American West (The Long Road to Mazatlán), to abolitionist Frederick Douglas - who was enslaved and became a prominent writer, speaker, and the most photographed man of the 19th century (Lessons of the Hour) - to Matthew Henson, the Black explorer who was among the first to reach the North Pole (True North).
Interesting chat between the artist and the curator
https://www.famsf.org/events/conversation-isaac-julien
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Joseph Gallivan has been a reporter since 1990. He has covered music for the London Independent, Technology for the New York Post, and arts and culture for the Portland Tribune and for Axios Portland. He is the author of two novels, "Oi, Ref!" and "England All Over" which are available lightly used.