Mapping Capitalism from Tulips to Trade

How does a large-scale painting of colorful shipping containers sinking into a golden ocean connect to a simple tulip drawn in black ink in a sketchbook? For artist Dewey Crumpler, these seemingly unrelated subjects are deeply personal and profoundly connected, pointing to the enduring legacies of global capitalism, from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary commerce.

On view at the David C. Driskell Center through Dec. 10, “Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies” showcases his exploration of these motifs through intricate works on paper and vibrant mixed-media paintings. The exhibition includes commanding pieces up to 60 x 72 inches, rich with bold colors, pop culture references, religious iconography and layered details inviting individual interpretation.

“It’s an occasion to see how a Black American artist tells the story of the Western world in a way that's seductive, that is fun to look at, that's humorous … but that is devastatingly serious at the same time,” said Sampada Aranke, guest curator and associate professor of art history at The Ohio State University. “He takes these two structures, the tulip and container, and brings them together so that audiences can learn a set of histories, a set of phenomena.”

Born in 1949, Crumpler was drawn to colors and patterns from an early age and spent his weekends at San Francisco’s de Young Museum from the age of 7. A graduate of San Francisco’s Balboa High School in 1967, he became active in the Black Arts Movement by the late 1960s and received early attention as a muralist working in the city. After studying mural-making in Mexico and honing his craft at institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College, he began a four-decade teaching career that spanned painting, drawing, jazz history and African studies.

The tulip became a central subject for Crumpler after a 1993 visit to Amsterdam’s Keukenhof Gardens, one of the world’s largest flower gardens. The vibrant colors and swaying forms of millions of blooms brought to mind the rhythms of Black people with natural hair dancing at high school garage parties. Inspired by the history of “Tulip Mania”—a 17th-century market bubble in Holland when the price of tulip bulbs briefly skyrocketed, then crashed—Crumpler began using tulips to represent the subjugation and commodification of Black bodies. Over decades, he explored this motif through mediums including paintings, works on paper and sculpture.

A few years after his trip to Amsterdam, while walking near the Oakland Pier, Crumpler became transfixed by the towering, colorful steel shipping containers he had passed countless times. Their monumental forms and looming shadows resonated as metaphors for the same global forces of commerce and exploitation he had previously dissected.

To Crumpler, the container ships symbolized a continuum of history: “The image of container ships as movers across oceans was similar to the caravels that transported goods—and people—across oceans in the 15th century. The inquiry into tulips brought the container ships into focus,” he said in an interview.

In some of his largest paintings, Crumpler has disemboweled these vessels, spilling their contents—from raw meat to Bart Simpson—as symbols of chaos and the consequences of globalization. In “Green Bananas,” a 2017 painting in the exhibition, bunches of the storied fruit wash ashore from capsized shipping containers as hermit crabs navigate the scattered cargo. One buries itself under a red Lego. Eagle-eyed viewers may even spot sculptor Marcel Duchamp’s iconic porcelain urinal from 1917 hidden in the wreckage.

Those are all clues, Crumpler said. “What is very important in my concept about making is that the work be full enough and have enough variety and ambiguity that a person can bring whatever they bring to it, and not be bogged down in a particular ideology,” he said. “The container has many properties we are all engaged with in the 21st century—and they’re also interesting to look at.”

The exhibition includes sketches and writings taken from the Crumpler Collection, a recent gift to the Driskell Center Archives that encompasses his lifetime of work. The collection includes such materials as his correspondence with artists, museums and galleries; recordings of lectures and classes; newspaper clippings; sketchbooks; and more.

Crumpler said he’s honored to have his papers in the “spiritual home” of the late Driskell, who had a deep impact on his own life. In 1976, Crumpler traveled to Los Angeles to visit the landmark “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that cemented Driskell’s legacy as a legendary champion of Black art, history and culture. Crumpler met Driskell decades later in San Francisco.

“To be connected to the history of David Driskell is a great honor,” he said.