The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, is proud to announce that the Center’s Archives will be home to The Crumpler Collection, a gift of Dewey Crumpler.
Since its founding in 2001, The Driskell Center has sought to create an intellectual home for scholars seeking a fuller understanding of the American art canon. That understanding can only come about through a reckoning with the outsized accomplishments of artists of African descent. That was David C. Driskell’s lifelong vision and his motivation for assembling an archive, the David C. Driskell Papers, over the course of five decades, that he would eventually donate to the Center in 2011. The Driskell Center Archives houses multiple collections, including the Faith Ringgold Study Room Collection, the Harmon Foundation Papers, the Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists, the Alonzo Davis Collection, the Michael D. Harris Collection, the Robin Holder Collection and now The Crumpler Collection. The Driskell Center’s Archives is supported in part by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC), and the Arts for All initiative at the University of Maryland.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
A graduate of San Francisco’s Balboa High School in 1967, Dewey Crumpler received early attention as a muralist. He was commissioned that same year to create a mural for Smokey Robinson and Motown Records in Detroit. Crumpler’s mural at San Francisco’s George Washington High School, completed several years later, is featured in a 2022 documentary, Town Destroyer. Crumpler went on to study mural painting with Pablo O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico City. In Mexico, he also came to know the artist Elizabeth Catlett. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art institute (where he would eventually teach for three decades) in 1972, his M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1974, and his MFA from Mills College in 1989. Crumpler has held lectureships at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University as well as multiple artist residencies in Paris and elsewhere.
Dewey Crumpler’s recent work integrates digital imagery and video with traditional painting. His work often examines the legacy of enslavement, globalization, and cultural commodification. He was the subject of “Dewey Crumpler: Currents” at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California in 2020, and his work was included in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” organized by the Tate Modern in London in 2017. Crumpler’s works are in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco’s de Young Museum, and the Bank of America Collection at the Harvey B. Gantt Center among other institutions.
The Crumpler Collection measures approximately 10 linear feet of physical material and 0.5 TB of digitized and born-digital data. The collection contains sketches and sketchbooks; flyers and posters; correspondence with other artists, museums, and galleries; writings; audiovisual material (including interviews and conversations with other artists; recordings of lectures given and classes taught); exhibition catalogs; periodicals; newspaper clippings; records of awards and commissions; photographs; Keynote presentations; reference materials and books used in teaching; and records related to Crumpler’s career at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College and University of California, Berkeley.