Review: Isaac Julien dreams a world at the de Young Museum

People often describe Isaac Julien’s video installations and films as “poetic,” but there were moments in “Isaac Julien: I Dream a World,” the major retrospective at the de Young, when I felt as if I was inside a poem — one that explodes with the power of visual metaphors, surprising angles, historical and cultural allusions, and that moment of recognition or discovery when one’s own mind completes an artist’s intimations.

The survey’s title is a nod to Langston Hughes’ poem “I Dream a World.” Hughes, who also wrote, “I wonder as I wander,” hovers like a guardian angel over Julien’s lone wanderers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, St. Lucia, London, Texas, the North Pole and Harlem. Julien, who says, “I see the works as inhabiting a realm which I’ve called a diasporic dream space,” shares Hughes’ universal vision and tender attention to the beauty along the edges of humanity.

The de Young Museum exhibition, which includes 10 multi-channel video installations and three early films presented over multiple galleries, is the largest-ever survey of Julien’s work. Several of the filmed pieces have been restored to digital videos that provide superior resolution.  The show, which opened April 12 and runs through July 13, challenges the expectations that people bring to visiting museums and watching movies. 

Born in London to parents who immigrated from St. Lucia, Julien has lived and worked in Britain and the United States since the 1990s. Officially Sir Isaac Julien since 2022, when Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, he is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

While the survey includes “10,000 Waves” (2010), a commemorative meditation on the deaths of Chinese immigrants drowned in 2004 on the English coast, and “A Marvellous Entanglement” (2019), about Lina Bo Bardi, a visionary Latin American architect, Black American diasporic regions loom largest in the artist’s mind. North Pole explorer Matthew Henson, Blaxploitation pioneer Melvin Van Peebles, the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, Frederick Douglass and the Harlem Renaissance are material for fresh articulations of American histories, mythologies, imagery and cultures.  

“Looking for Langston” (1989), Julien’s best-known work in this country, confects a world of gorgeous gay Black artists, models, writers and performers mingling with gay white patrons and culture vultures during the Harlem Renaissance. Looking, as in searching for, but also as in gazing upon, devouring the desired with one’s eyes, is another recurring motif throughout his works. The film imagines the Harlem Renaissance that  Hughes (who is assumed, but not definitively known, to have been gay) might have inhabited. 

Julien suggests “Once Again … (Statues Never Die)” 2022 could be a “prequel” to “Looking for Langston.” If you are familiar with the older work, watching “Once Again … ,” you may recognize the late Oakland singer-songwriter and gay activist Blackberri crooning “Blues for Langston,” one of the songs he wrote for “Looking for Langston,” or marvel at the bejeweled angel boys beaming from the balcony at a gay Harlem speakeasy who haven’t aged a day since they first appeared in 1989. If you aren’t, you may wonder why you can’t Shazam that gorgeous song, and the shining, hot angels will seem as right now! as the long nail extensions actor Andre Howard sports as Alain Locke. 

A writer, editor and philosopher, Locke was considered the “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. “Once Again … (Statues Never Die),” commissioned by the Barnes Foundation for its 2022 centennial, features Locke discussing African art and Harlem Renaissance artists with Dr. Albert C. Barnes (played by Danny Huston), the Philadelphia art collector who was a prominent White figure in the Harlem Renaissance. The video asks: Who gets to own Black art? Who gets to classify it? And how do Black artists value each other independent from white patrons and the white gaze?            

At nearly 35 minutes, this is one of the longest pieces in the exhibition. When I first saw it last summer in New York in the Whitney Biennial, I perched on a crowded bench at the back of the room. There wasn’t a bench in the de Young gallery, and this turned out to be a very good thing: I had to keep moving among the five screens. 

At times, Julien’s video installations resemble a song sung in rounds, but the intervals and images are unpredictable. Deep into something on the screen in front of me, I was startled by the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned to see Locke on a different screen, striding up a grand staircase. At that video’s end, Locke stands hatless, head bowed in a snowfall. As some flakes fell and others rose back to the sky, I shivered.  

Liminal states and liminal spaces — dreams, fantasies, time travel, flashbacks, cliffhangers, ghosts, passing, mirrors and thresholds — can be found throughout Black film, from Oscar Micheaux and Bill Gunn to Mati Diop and Ryan Coogler.

“Julien’s subjects are never locked in time or place,” says Claudia Schmuckli, who curated the show.  Being between states — an immigrant, a woman-cyborg, Melvin Van Peebles meeting his wax doppelganger, or being on the edge of time, of hope, of desire, of danger — are all representations of African diasporic experiences. 

But, unlike those other Black film artists, Julien literally puts a viewer in a physically liminal space between screens where one can sense possibilities and precarity.            

Of his compositional approach of “radical montage,” Julien says, “it’s really about the idea of learning the way that we look and the habits that we take for granted in looking.” 

A lot has changed about how we look and what we look at in the nearly 30 years since he began making this work. At a museum conversation with Schmuckli, Julien acknowledged this.

“New technologies demand that we rewrite and re-picture the way that we look and appreciate images. There’s a real lack of understanding about their circulation, how they win elections, how they create consent, how they politically marshal populations into ways of thinking that people don’t question necessarily,” he said.             

Agreed. And that’s what makes the way this survey is presented so frustrating. To appreciate what Julien calls his “alternative visual grammar,” you need to spend time absorbing the layers of information, images and ideas across the multiple screens. 

There are more than four hours of films and video installations in the show. It can be hard to know where to look, because there are 10 major works, ranging from nearly 12 to nearly 50 minutes long, as well as  some rarely seen early  pieces. Countdown clocks outside the galleries can give visitors a sense of how far along a screening is, but there’s no good way to coordinate seeing multiple complete pieces.            

“Isaac is not prescriptive about people having to see his films from beginning to end,” Schmuckli emailed me, in response to a question. “His works don’t follow a linear structure, but are poetic meditations on their subjects.

“People should feel free to enter anytime, and if they are compelled to experience parts that they missed, they can simply stay once a film ends since they loop. Or, in the instance where two films are shown in the same space, come again for the part they missed. That’s when the timers come in handy.”

Schmuckli, the newly named chief curator of modern and contemporary art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has known Julien since 1999. This survey is the manifestation of a vision she set when she arrived at the de Young six years ago. Everyone involved has a right to be proud of this signal achievement.  

But as an arts writer whose primary concern is connecting audiences and art, I wonder how much thought was given to how people would experience this exhibition. 

Last summer, in addition to seeing “Once Again,” at the Whitney, I saw Julien’s piece about Frederick Douglass and the power of photography, “Lesson of the Hour” (2019), twice: In New York at MoMA, and in D.C. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Gallery. Neither work was competing directly with other timed video installations, and I could see them in their entirety without stressing over the clock. 

I expect that the viewers who will get the most out of the de Young show are those with the time and money (membership or $29 for entry) for repeat visits. I also expect they will be people with robust attention spans who are game to see something new. In other words, not the typical citizen of this digital age. 

A friend who is an experimental filmmaker and visual cultures scholar noted that while these works are called “visual installations,” they are much longer and more complex than those tend to be. The production values are higher, too.

In addition to actors, Julien works with choreographers, songwriters, calligraphers, poets and dancers. The credits for “Looking for Langston” are a syllabus of the GOATs of cultural, media, artistic and literary scholarship and production. Most museum visitors  are used to wandering in and out of video installations, but these works reward sustained attention.

“Isaac Julien: I Dream a World” is dense with allusions and ideas and surprises and critiques and pathos, and all of that rich stuff can be easy to miss, especially if you’re out of the habit of looking longer.

I would suggest watching “Looking for Langston” at home before you go to the de Young. Don’t miss “Once Again … (Statues Never Die)” or “Baltimore,” which may make you laugh. Then take in a couple of the triptychs or “Lesson of the Hour.” Pretend you are at a film festival and settle in.