Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)Yerba Buena / SoMa, San Francisco

Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages

Now showing30 September 2026 – 30 May 2027$15

First major museum retrospective of Bay Area artist Dewey Crumpler, pairing five decades of paintings with new kinetic installations across all three floors.

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On now All of October 2026

Shipping containers, hooded figures, voids and metallic surfaces keep coming back in Dewey Crumpler's paintings, and here canvases made decades apart hang in the same galleries and answer each other. Some of the works took years, even decades, to finish, because he holds that a painting should enter the world only once it has realized its full possibilities.

The show runs across all three floors and pairs paintings from five decades with newly commissioned kinetic works. The museum says it shifts as you move through it: reflections change, the kinetic pieces activate and connections between paintings surface slowly. You've watched the Oakland container cranes from the Bay Bridge on a hundred commutes. Crumpler kept looking.

No reviews of the show are published yet, so this is the museum's own account of it. Admission is $15, or $7 for seniors, students and educators, and it covers all three floors. Tickets are booked at moadsf.org/tickets.

Editor's pick

Shipping containers, hooded figures and metallic voids recur across five decades of Dewey Crumpler's paintings, hung so canvases made decades apart answer each other. The Bay Area painter's first major museum retrospective adds new kinetic works across three floors.

Look for

The newly commissioned kinetic works
Moving forms and reflective surfaces that change as you walk past, so the same room looks different from one spot to the next.