MoAD Gives Dewey Crumpler His First Major Museum Show, Opening September 30

The Museum of the African Diaspora reopens on September 30, 2026 with Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages, which the museum calls the first major museum exhibition to trace the continuity of Crumpler’s practice across more than five decades. It runs through May 30, 2027 and occupies all three floors of the museum at 685 Mission Street.

What Is in the Show

The exhibition pairs paintings from several periods of Crumpler’s career with newly commissioned kinetic works, so pieces made decades apart hang in the same rooms. The museum names shipping containers, hooded figures, voids, metallic surfaces and moving forms as recurring elements, and describes the work as an investigation of Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory and time. Two of the paintings on the exhibition page are Green Bananas (2017) and Negropolitans (2020), both charcoal, graphite and mixed media on canvas.

Because some works are kinetic and others are on reflective, metallic surfaces, the museum says the galleries change as visitors move through them.

Who Dewey Crumpler Is

Crumpler was born in Arkansas in 1949 and works in the Bay Area as an artist and educator. He started as a city muralist and studied under Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He was an associate professor of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where his students included Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts.

His work is held by the Oakland Museum of California, the Triton Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, and digital images of his murals appeared in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation in 2017. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a Flintridge Foundation Award and the Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship Eureka Award.

The Rest of the Fall Season

Three other exhibitions open the same day. After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora brings together ceramic work by PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop and Sharon Norwood. Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats!, the museum’s Emerging Artist exhibition, runs September 30 to December 6, 2026 and combines ceramic sculpture, protest ephemera and performance elements. Tahirah Rasheed: The Light We Carry Forward works in glass, print and photography.

The season also launches SANCTUARY: Art as Care, a museum-wide program of exhibitions, conversations and artist-led experiences. Key Jo Lee, the museum’s chief of curatorial affairs and public programs, frames it around a single question: what becomes possible when there is space to slow down and look.

Planning a Visit

MoAD is closed through September 29 while the fall exhibitions are installed, and reopens September 30. That is the same day Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week begins, running September 30 to October 4. The museum’s annual Afropolitan Ball follows on October 3 and carries the same Sonic Lineages subtitle as the Crumpler show.

The museum is at 685 Mission Street at Third, on the ground floor of the St. Regis, a short walk from Montgomery Street station. Admission is free on the second Saturday of each month through the Thrive @ MoAD program sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, which is also listed in our roundup of free museum days in San Francisco in September 2026.

Details from the museum’s Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages and Fall 2026 Exhibitions pages.

Photo: Jllm06, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.