Features film installations and videos made over the course of 25 years by pioneering artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, presenting a compelling fusion of fact and fiction, social critique, and aesthetic immersion. 

Major multi-channel video installation – Lessons of the Hour (2019) – acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 

de Young museum / April 12 – July 13, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO, February 3 – The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the “Fine Arts Museums”) are pleased to announce Isaac Julien: I Dream a World. Over the past 25 years, artist Isaac Julien has developed a singular, choreographic style of moving image exhibition in the form of immersive multichannel film and video installations. Distinguished by their compelling fusion of fact and fiction, social critique, and aesthetic immersion, Julien’s works offer poetic reflections on political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals and societies around the world—especially for those on the margins of power. 

Featuring 10 major video installations made across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas between 1999 and 2022 plus early films, I Dream a World is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a US museum setting and the largest exhibition focusing on Julien’s film and video installation works to date.

“Isaac Julien is one of the most influential voices in visual culture, Black cultural studies, and queer independent cinema working today, and we are honored to present his first US retrospective at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums. “In groundbreaking works such as Lessons of the Hour (2019), which we were privileged to acquire in 2023, Julien engages with the urgent social issues of our time and invites viewers to rethink the dominant historical narratives of the global north.”

Whether centering historical moments such as the first American-led expedition to reach the North Pole in 1908-09, or the often fateful but ongoing migration of North African refugees across the Mediterranean Sea, Julien’s subjects are never locked in one time or place. The same is true for his portraits of individuals like abolitionist Frederick Douglass and architect Lina Bo Bardi, or his subversive address of cultural institutions like Hollywood and the Museum as arbiters and archives of social ideals, constructs, and hierarchies of the West.

“Favoring nonlinear narrative techniques such as reiteration, reflection, and transposition in his orchestration of images and sounds across multiple screens, Julien folds the past onto the present and the present onto the past. In each work, Julien weaves different temporalities, ideas, and imaginations into substantiations of a multi-dimensional selfhood that is not merely in, but of this world. In doing so he allows history and memory to emerge as intimate and desirous visions of a way of being,” remarked Claudia Schmuckli, organizing curator and Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Museums. 

The first major exhibition at the Fine Arts Museums dedicated entirely to an artist working with the moving image in the form of multiscreen video installations, I Dream a World will start with Julien’s groundbreaking films Looking for Langston (1989), which gave definition to the genre of New Queer Cinema, Lost Boundaries (1981-87) and This Is Not An Aids Advertisement (1987). Unfolding through the de Young’s Herbst Special Exhibition galleries, the installations will be grouped according to their thematic resonance and connected through a central nave featuring archival materials. 

The installations on view include Baltimore (2003), A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), Western Union: Small Boats (2007), Lessons of the Hour (2019) - a recent FAMSF acquisition, The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), Paradise Omeros (2002), True North (2004), Fantôme Afrique (2005), concluding with Julien’s most recent work Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022). Ten Thousand Waves (2010) will be on view in Wilsey Court, one of the de Young’s free public spaces. 

Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Opening April 12, 2025 at the de Young museum, the exhibition will run through July 13, 2025.

About the Featured Works 

Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022) (31’34”)

Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022) explores the reciprocal impact of the work of Alain Locke, a philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Albert E. Barnes, the pioneering art collector who promoted a democratic, inclusive educational enterprise. Once Again... (Statues Never Die) explores Locke’s engagement with the Barnes collection, honoring both Locke’s contribution to the arts while inviting critical conversations about the African material culture that influenced the Black cultural movement. Imagining his installation as a form of “poetic restitution,” Julien alludes to contemporary restitution debates - examining the display and significance of African material culture in Western art museums.

A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) (39’06”)

A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) is a meditation on the work and legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992). A central figure of Latin American modernist architecture, Bo Bardi devoted her working life to promoting the social and cultural potential of art, architecture and design. Focusing on Bo Bardi’s public projects instead of private edifices, Isaac Julien’s immersive installation emphasizes her social, political and cultural views, alongside her philosophical reflections. 

Lessons of the Hour (2019) (28’46”)

The 10-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) presents an immersive and poetic portrait of the orator, philosopher, intellectual and self-liberated freedom fighter Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who was born into slavery in Maryland, USA, and who campaigned against slavery for freedom and social justice. 

The most photographed American of his era, Douglass had a keen understanding of how technology could influence human relations. Douglass’ own reflections on visual culture, in which he anticipated Walter Benjamin’s idea of the reproducibility of images and the loss of their aura, gained him international recognition as an artist and cultural theorist. His lectures on photography gave him a keen understanding of technologies that shape human relationships. 

Filmed at sites in London, Edinburgh and at Douglass’ home in Washington D.C., Julien’s film combines tableaux vivants which imagine scenes from Douglass’s public and private life, with footage from the present day. In the film, the character of Douglass interacts with other cultural icons of his time and features prominently his wife Anna Murray Douglass who was responsible for helping Douglass achieve not only his freedom, but also supported him throughout his life.

Ten Thousand Waves (2010) (49’41”)

Ten Thousand Waves (2010) commemorates the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England. Julien interweaves contemporary Chinese culture with its ancient myths—including the fable of the goddess Mazu, which comes from the Fujian Province, from where the Morecambe Bay workers originated. 

Filmed on location in Guangxi province and Shanghai, the work extends Julien’s meditation on global histories of human migration, here set against a background of Chinese history, legend, and landscape. The installation is staged on the streets of both modern and old Shanghai, and includes music and sounds that fuse Eastern and Western traditions, as well as collaborators ranging from calligrapher Gong Fagen, the film and video artist Yang Fudong, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi, and poet Wang Ping, from whom Julien commissioned “Small Boats,” a poem that is recited in Ten Thousand Waves.

Western Union: small boats (2007) (18’22”)

Western Union: small boats (2007) reflects on the harrowing fates of individuals who attempt the 100-mile journey from North Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to the southern coast of Sicily. Transferred from large vessels into overcrowded fishing boats, some may find rescue, but just as often they tragically sink to their deaths. 

The film juxtaposes images of the Mediterranean passage—Black bodies crowded in rafts, laid out in reflective blankets on Italian shores, drowning in tempestuous waters—with the tranquil spaces of European tourism and luxury. Employing references to Italian cinema, and the work of Luchino Visconti, the installation utilizes dance and the movement of bodies, echoing these journeys but also rearticulating them while tracing the effects of trauma not just on people but also on the built environment and the life it engenders. 

Fantôme Afrique (2005) (16’ 55”)

Named after the 1934 book L’Afrique Fantôme by Michel Leiris, which details the author’s participation in a French state-sponsored anthropological expedition, Fantôme Afrique (2005) reflects on the entwined legacies of colonial occupation and postcolonial self-determination. Shot in Burkina Faso, the film weaves together imagery of Ouagadougou, the country’s capital and center for cinema in Africa, with that of rural landscapes, architecture, and archival footage from expeditions and African history. The “trickster” and “witness” characters figure in this poignant meditation on the encounters between local and global cultures, where the ghosts of history linger amid the realities of the day.

True North (2004) (14’20”)

True North (2004) is inspired by the story of Matthew Henson, a Black explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on a 1909 expedition led by two Indigenous guides to find the “true north.” He and their guides were written out of history by Peary, who claimed the honor of being the first to discover the North Pole for himself alone. 

Julien reexamines the history of polar exploration in terms of race and gender. The installation offers a visual counter-reading of space and time and its relation to counter histories. It contests binaries that are present in many notations of the expedition and the reason, order, and stability are replaced by irrational meanderings, symbolic gestures within the unceasing monumentality of the ice, anticipating the climate change debates.

Baltimore (2003) (11’ 53”)

Filmed in Baltimore at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, the Peabody Library, and the Walters Museum, Baltimore (2003) stars the famed blaxploitation film director and actor Melvin Van Peebles and an archetypal, Foxy Brown–type character. Employing the look and feel of blaxploitation cinema as the characters navigate these radically different institutions and their claims to memory, the work explores the many ways that history is constructed, documented, silenced, or foretold. 

Incorporating high-tech special effects and time-bending elements, Julien seeks to create a “third dimension,” a space that anticipates Afrofuturism and its conflation of the past, present, and future of Black cultures in the United States. Julien appropriates the styles, gestures, language and iconography of the blaxploitation genre to create a work that defies easy categorization and, like some of Julien’s other works in this exhibition (Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) from 2022 or A Marvellous Entanglement from 2019), it uses a museum as a key location and theme.

Paradise Omeros (2002) (20’36”)

Paradise Omeros (2002) is inspired by a poem Omeros by Nobel Prize-winning Saint Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott. This riveting 3-screen installation delves into the fantasies and feelings of “Creoleness”—the mixed language, the hybrid mental states, and the shifting sense of place that arise when one is formed within multiple cultures. It is set in London in the 1960s and on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. 

The film’s protagonist, Achille, appears in both locations, first working as a waiter at a brilliantly colorful tropical resort and later wandering through bleak and gray London housing projects as the dreamlike scenes of the ocean and a lively West Indian party in his parents’ apartment speak to the fragile beauty of his world. Using the recurrent imagery of the sea, the film sweeps the viewer into a poetic meditation on the ebb and flow of self and stranger, love and hate, war and peace, xenophobe and xenophile. 

The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999) (18’27”)

The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999) is a meditation on the aesthetics and politics of the classic Hollywood western and the figure of the cowboy as constitutive to American ideals of masculinity, individuality and freedom. Filmed in and around San Antonio, Texas, in collaboration with Venezuela-born choreographer Javier de Frutos, the film captures the erotically charged interchanges between a young Latino man and a working cowboy. 

Combining performance and dance, The Long Road to Mazatlán explores the social construction of masculinity within mythic landscapes of the American West. The film gained Julien a nomination for the Turner Prize, bestowed since 1984 by Tate for an outstanding exhibition or presentation by a British artist. 

Looking for Langston (1989) (46’29”)

Filmed in black and white, Looking for Langston (1989) is a lyrical exploration of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes and his fellow Black artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The film is widely considered a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire, and the reciprocity of the gaze and it would become the hallmark of what American scholar and film critic B. Ruby Rich termed New Queer Cinema.

Julien shot Looking for Langston in the 1980s in London but set it in the jazz world of 1920s Harlem where his use of low-key lighting and sculptural smoke entangled historical periodization, and created a self-conscious timelessness. While Julien was directing the film, he paid close attention to the photographs of James Van der Zee, George Platt Lynes and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the viewer can notice a relation between images imbued with references to the history of 1930s black-and-white African American photography and 1980s British Queer cultures.

Early works

Lost Boundaries was made using Isaac Julien’s personal super-8mm film archive, which spans the years 1981-1987. During this period, he made several films in diarist form. This work was produced as a way of portraying a lost part of an experimental film-making practice that developed during the early 1980s in what was known as the Independent Film Workshop Movement. Lost Boundaries comprises footage shot on location, in England in the summer of 1985. It was made during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective’s first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed with Maureen Blackwood, another member of the collective. 

Lost Boundaries deconstructs, and foregrounds, the means of 16mm film production. Julien has described the film as ‘weaving together a fragile community of Black artists and actors who came to prominence at a time when debates in film theory were at the forefront of establishing a new politics of artistic representation, a Black avant-garde.

This Is Not An Aids Advertisement (1987)

With its pink haze, seductive soundtrack and stylistic approach, This Is Not An Aids Advertisement celebrates sexual desire and queer relationships. Featuring Julien himself, it is a radical rejection of the fear that emerged during the HIV epidemic, focusing on love, desire and romance.

This Is Not An Aids Advertisement was conceived as a work of activism made for television broadcast at the height of the AIDS crisis. Julien asks: ‘How is sexual desire surviving under the modern regime of AIDS-fearing morality?’ The video is an important work of LGBTQIA+ history that continues to resonate powerfully; encouraging us to reflect on what has changed.

About Isaac Julien

Born in London in 1960, Isaac Julien, KBE is a critically acclaimed British artist and filmmaker. In his immersive film installation work, reality gives way to dreams and their kaleidoscopic breaking down of barriers between film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture.

Julien’s works interrelate history with fantasy, film with photography and poetry with sculpture, to create singular cultural and historical figures that feature in his installations. His work invites viewers into immersive states of being, both political and critical through its transcendental, poetic approach. 

The true shape and power of Julien’s art comes into focus using alternative imaginations with multi-layered visuals and non-hierarchical narrative techniques. With his intricate interweaving of historical, textual, cinematic, musical, and artistic moments and traditions into novel constellations and affective affinities, he creates captivating images and seductive sounds that produce both novel ideas and the space for them to breathe. Temporal fusion and its visual strategies are central to Julien’s works, where the creative reimagination of historical and contemporary blend into what Julien, quoting bell hooks, often refers to as “diasporic dream spaces.” As we experience Isaac Julien’s extraordinary installations, we enter into a diasporic dream space to create new counter-imaginary possibilities.

Recent international solo exhibitions include Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2024); K21, Dusseldorf, Germany (2023); Tate Britain, London (2023); Lina Bo Bardi, A Marvellous Entanglement, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2023), Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, North Carolina (2022), and MAXXI, Rome (2020–2021); Lessons of the Hour, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (2022–2023), and McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (2020–2021); Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2022); Western Union: Small Boats, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York (2020); Looking for Langston, Tate Britain, London (2019); and Playtime, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019).

In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is a distinguished professor of the arts and leads the Moving Image Lab together with arts professor Mark Nash. 

Catalogue

Isaac Julien: I Dream A World will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring newly commissioned essays and archival materials, many previously unpublished, that relate to the works in the exhibition and give insight into the artist’s working process and recognition of the archive as an important repository of history and memory. Edited by Claudia Schmuckli, the publication will feature an introduction by Schmuckli and essays by Hilton Als, Lisa E.Bloom, Christopher Leigh Connery, Peter Ericksson, Jennifer A. González, Dan Hicks, Michael Kelly, Josė Esteban Muñoz, Mark Nash, B. Ruby Rich, and Armond White.

Exhibition Organization

This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by Bank of America.

Presenting Sponsor

Ford Foundation

Lead Sponsor

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Major Support

Stanlee Gatti

Rebecca and Cal Henderson

The Herbst Foundation, Inc.

Significant Support

Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin

Sakurako and William Fisher

Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese

Tara and Bryan Meehan

Joanna Miller

The Helen & Will Webster Foundation

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

University of California, Santa Cruz

Generous Support

Jessica Silverman

Pro Av Saarikko Oy

Victoria Miro

Gwynned Vitello

Lisa and Jim Zanze

Additional support is provided in memory of Mary Beth Hagey, and by Lizelle and Martin Green, Lore Harp McGovern and Katie and Matt Paige.

About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, comprising the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, is the largest public arts institution in San Francisco.

The de Young museum originated from the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park. The present copper-clad landmark building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, opened in 2005. Reflecting an active conversation among cultures, perspectives, and time periods, the collections on view include American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 17th to the 21st centuries; arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; costume and textile arts; and international modern and contemporary art. 

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are located on land unceded by the Ramaytush Ohlone, who are the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula. The greater Bay Area is also the ancestral territory of other Ohlone peoples, as well as the Miwok, Yokuts, and Patwin. We acknowledge, recognize, and honor the Indigenous ancestors, elders, and descendants whose nations and communities have lived in the Bay Area over many generations and continue to do so today. We respect the enduring relationships that exist between Indigenous peoples and their homelands. We are committed to partnering with Indigenous communities to raise awareness of their legacy and engage with the history of the region, the impacts of genocide, and the dynamics of settler colonialism that persist today.

Media Contacts

Morgan Braitberg, Publicist, press@famsf.org 

Helena Nordstrom, Director of Communications, hnordstrom@famsf.org