Sir Isaac Julien’s dreamworld comes alive at the de Young Museum in San Francisco
Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside several early single-channel films including his iconic Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum setting and his first retrospective in the United States.
By Dan White
“I Dream a World,” the acclaimed new exhibition at the de Young Museum on view through July 13, marks the first major retrospective of Isaac Julien—an internationally celebrated artist and Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities—offering an expansive look at his groundbreaking career.
Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside several early single-channel films including his iconic Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum setting and his first retrospective in the United States.
Julien is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and in the History of Consciousness Department, which is part of the Humanities Division.
“Sir Isaac Julien’s work brings us closer to historical possibility,” said Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder. “It interrogates racial violence, queer identity, and displacement through aspirational forms of storytelling. Sir Isaac’s impact is worldwide, and the de Young exhibition is a remarkable—and long overdue—celebration of his work in the United States.”
“Julien’s work also resonates deeply within UC Santa Cruz’s academic culture,” Alinder added. “He’s a creator and scholar who believes that visual storytelling can change the world, a belief also exemplified by Professor Anna Tsing and Professor Emerita Donna Haraway, who were, like Sir Isaac, featured in ArtReview’s Power 100 list for their groundbreaking work. He is part of a proud lineage of influential scholars on campus who are reshaping global discourse.”
The themes of his work in the de Young retrospective range from global migration to the collection and appropriation of African artists and art by Western museums to the celebration of cultural figures who overcame racial oppression.
Spanning Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Asia, Julien’s works untangle the complex web of post-colonial conditions that has shaped the lives of individuals and societies across the globe.
In her review for KQED FM, Veronica Esposito wrote that Julien’s show is “less an exhibition and more a living, breathing cinematic universe — one that challenges, dazzles, and envelops the viewer in a sensorial loop of history, identity, and art.”
“In Isaac Julien’s thrilling show … the shifting images on gallery screens seem to respond to one another with something approaching sentience,” Esposito writes. “If montage is the language that film uses to communicate things like character, plot and emotion to us, then Julien’s elaborate video pieces speak in a cinematic language I’ve never heard before.”
“While most directors attempt to use the language of montage to tell a story roughly analogous to a novel, installation artists like Julien do something else entirely,” Esposito continues.
A valued mentor at UC Santa Cruz
At UC Santa Cruz, Julien’s impact extends well beyond the gallery and the screen.
In 2019, alongside Arts and History of Consciousness Professor Mark Nash, a distinguished independent curator, film historian and filmmaker, he co-founded the Isaac Julien Lab—an interdisciplinary space dedicated to fostering research and creative practice at the intersection of art and critical theory.
Julien’s recent course, What Freedom Is To Me, provided students with a rare opportunity to engage directly with a globally acclaimed artist.
“You may be curious about what Sir Isaac is like as a professor,” said Dean of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital Media Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu. “He shares his platform with his students and ensures a global education when bringing Santa Cruz to London, exemplifying what our faculty do at UC Santa Cruz in empowering our students to go big and gain confidence to create audacious fearless and courageous work. On campus and beyond, Isaac is a staunch advocate of diversity, equity, inclusion and decolonizing our curriculum to ensure belonging for all, which is clearly reflected in his students. Their work enables us to see what Isaac does: unleashing the full power of the arts when everyone has access.
Irena Polić, Managing Director of The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, hopes this high-profile exhibition—hosted in the same space that has featured the likes of David Hockney, Judy Chicago, and Faith Ringgold—will draw global attention to Julien’s work at the Moving-Image Lab, funded by the Mellon Foundation and housed at THI.
“Sir Isaac Julien’s extraordinary Dreamworld retrospective at the de Young Museum rightly celebrates the global reach and profound impact of his work,” Polić said. “Here at UC Santa Cruz, we’re incredibly proud to host the Moving-Image Lab, co-directed by Professor Mark Nash, where their vision continues to shape a new generation of artists and thinkers.”
The Lab is not only a site for artistic innovation—it’s a hub for critical inquiry, collaboration, and justice-centered creativity. Axelle Toussant, a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Visual Culture, and a Moving Image Lab public fellow, worked with the deYoung Museum’s Holly Johnson and Parker Harris Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Claudia Schmuckli on the exhibition.
An artist with global impact
The de Young show closely follows a remarkable year of recognition for Julien. In 2024, he was ranked the fifth most influential artist in the world by ArtReview in its annual Power 100 list—a historic moment in which all top ten artists were celebrated for engaging with social and political issues.
“Julien uses and then redefines the visual medium as a tool against cultural erasure and capitalism,” wrote Prince Shakur in a 2023 ArtReview essay on Julien’s exhibition What Freedom Is To Me at London’s Tate Britain. Shakur praised Julien’s ability to conjure “boundless, often queer Black histories” and create “a liberating dream space in the face of reality.”
In 2022, Julien was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to diversity and inclusion in the arts and was also invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Reflecting on the honor, Julien said, “I think about the sheer amount of concentration one needs to do the work. One must try to not let anything—including the high points—detract from that. It’s important to keep one’s head in place, as it were, and one’s feet firmly on the ground.”
Original Link: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/04/sir-isaac-juliens-dreamworld-comes-alive-at-the-de-young-museum-in-san-francisco/