I Dream a World
April 12–July 13, 2025
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the “Fine Arts Museums”) are pleased to present Isaac Julien: I Dream a World. Over the past 25 years, artist Isaac Julien has developed a singular, choreographic style of multichannel film and video installations. Distinguished by their 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 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 four early films, I Dream a World is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in the US 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 urgent social issues 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. The same is true for his portraits of individuals like abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the subject of Lessons of the Hour, 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, Julien’s rhizomatic montage of image and sound across multiple screens interweaves different temporalities, ideas, and imaginations. His multi-channel video installations counter the forceful contemporary drive toward the reduction of our desires—the playback of our depletion into statistical shadows—with expansive possibilities of selfhood and identity,” remarked Claudia Schmuckli, organizing curator and Holly Johnson and Parker Harris 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 starts 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 are grouped according to 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) is 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, Holly Johnson and Parker Harris Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Opening April 12, 2025 at the de Young museum, the exhibition will run through July 13, 2025.
Media contacts
Morgan Braitberg, Publicist, press [at] famsf.org / Helena Nordstrom, Director of Communications, hnordstrom [at] famsf.org