Published by Cushion Works and The Salamander Press
A catalogue in conjunction with the fall 2021 exhibition of the same name at Cushion Works in San Francisco.
Featuring an interview with the artist by the exhibition curators, Sampada Aranke and Jordan Stein.
34 pgs, 71 illustrations, saddle stiched

Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) has painted intergalactic hooded figures since the mid-1990s, when an interest in ritual objects, Black culture, and space-time cosmology married in his mind and studio. The Hoodies, as he calls them, are a cyclical preoccupation, rendered between the development of major bodies of work. He returns to them every few years, like a song stuck in the head. Hoodies are marginal figures painted in the margins; bodiless forms that come to life between robust bodies of work, and iterated on over the course of many decades, perpetually emergent.

Crumpler has taught in the painting department at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1989, where he has led classes on not only mark-making, but Jazz and African studies. His students have included Iona Brown and Kehinde Wiley, and he is the focus of scholarly writings by Melanie Herzog and Benjamin L. Jones. His most recent exhibitions include COLLAPSE: recent paintings by Dewey Crumpler at the Hedreen Gallery in Seattle, and Possessions, a virtual gallery at Frieze 2020 curated by Chisenhale Gallery Director Zoé Whitley. Crossings, a large-scale exhibition of his recent Shipping Container works, opens in 2022 at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California. His work is in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Select Hoodie paintings were exhibited in Of Tulips and Shadows, a 2008 exhibition at the California African American Museum. 

Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and October. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. Aranke is currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power.