By Noma Faingold (April 16, 2025)
Watching the 28-minute, 10-screen film/art installation, “Lessons of the Hour,” by British artist/filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, isn’t as overwhelming as one might think. In fact, the flood of images, sounds and words, dedicated to the life of writer, orator, philosopher, and social justice activist Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895), a former slave, allows the viewer to absorb and interpret the immersive experience in their own way.
“In ‘Lessons of the Hour’ there are many scenes that are striking and jarring,” Claudia Schmuckli said, who, as chief curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), organized the ambitious exhibition titled, Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, which opened at the de Young Museum on April 12.
Ten Julien film installations are featured, covering works he created from 1999 to 2022. It’s the most comprehensive exhibit in the United States for Julien, who is a professor at UC Santa Cruz, dividing his time between the UK and Northern California. It’s also the first major exhibition at FAMSF dedicated entirely to an artist working with the moving image.
In 2023, FAMSF not only acquired “Lessons of the Hour,” (completed in 2019) at the urging of Schmuckli, the museum has undergone significant interior changes and devoted a lot of space to stage I Dream a World.
“It’s so radical. It’s the first time that these galleries have been completely transformed. We’ve taken existing walls out and we’ve reconceived the entire space and how you move through it,” Schmuckli said. “We did that because of the specific demands of the work, which require discreet screening rooms with acoustic insulation. We also wanted to create an environment that allows you to move in and out of the different video installations into a central space.”
Atrium for “Isaac Julien- I Dream A World.” Photograph by Henrik Kam
The way Schmuckli described it, there is a well-lit atrium for the exhibit. Its purpose is to be kind of a home base, where visitors can read about each work and check out small monitors (displaying how far along each piece is in its running time) to see how they want to navigate each dark room housing the 10 different works. It’s also a place where viewers can sit and digest what they just saw. The atrium also has vitrines containing ephemera and archival material related to the individual films/installations.
Julien, 65, who graduated from Saint Martins School of Art in London with a degree in Fine Art, Film and Video, became a leading figure in experimental film through the 1980s. In the early 2000s, the pioneering artist shifted to gallery and museum spaces. “In school, I was doing painting, sculpture and photography,” Julien said during a conversation with Schmuckli, which was free to the public on opening day in the museum’s Koret Auditorium.
Photo by Noma Faingold
“I’ve always been interested in how I could embellish all of those forms in my work,” Julien added. “I wanted to enter into the field of film as a way of trying to change the rules of representation. I wanted to pull the rug underneath people’s feet and to highlight the cinematic aspects of film in painterly ways, but also in ways that might question how you looked at images.”
He started with single-screen projects and gradually moved into more complex works involving three screens, five screens and 10 screens. The common thematic threads in his career include portraying Black Americans – weaving history, fantasy and current issues together in poetic reflections, social critique of political and cultural events.
Visually, the films are stunningly beautiful, particularly the 1989 award-winning, single-screen, black-and-white film, “Looking for Langston,” which will be shown outside the de Young’s main galleries. The groundbreaking, dream-like work about writer Langston Hughes is set mostly during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s jazz age. The only spoken word comes from Hughes in archival footage of him reading his own prose.
Several scenes are set in a clandestine speakeasy for gay men, who all happen to be quite gorgeous and impeccably dressed. They dance together elegantly and drink champagne, seemingly without a care in the world. Of course, the film doesn’t end so blissfully.
Isaac Julien “Pas de Deux No. 2 (Looking for Langston Vintage Series),” 1989/2016 Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminum and framed, 22 7/8 x 29 3/8 in. (58.1 x 74.5 cm) © Isaac Julien Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
Julien said that his students pointed out that the artist “uses the aesthetic of critical fabulation, which I wasn’t aware of.”
Fabulation, more commonly used in literature, is the act of fabricating, bending realism or inventing stories to explore new narrative possibilities. Obvious examples in film of boundary-defying storytelling include Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” where the filmmaker rewrote historical outcomes, specifically World War II and the Manson Family killings, respectively. It’s the way the auteur wanted it to be.
“I like looking at the archives as springboards for invention, for imagination and for rearticulation,” Julien said. “I am looking at these figures from these moments and reimagining them. They’re based on historical evidence, but I bring them into another space.”
Installation view of Isaac Julien, “Ten Thousand Waves” (2010) Photograph by Henrik Kam
Other works being shown include, “The Long Road to Mazatlán” (1999), “Paradise Omeros” (2002) and “Ten Thousand Waves” (2010). Filmed on location in Guangxi province and Shanghai, “Ten Thousand Waves” revisits 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. The nine-screen projections will be on view in Wilsey Court, one of the museum’s free public spaces.
Isaac Julien. “Maiden of Silence (Ten Thousand Waves),” 2010
Endura Ultra photograph, 70 7/8 x 94 1/2 x 3 in. (180 x 240 x 7.5 cm) © Isaac Julien
Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
With this retrospective, Schmuckli wanted to make sure that visitors could see how Julien’s work has evolved. “There’s a clear trajectory from a cinematic context and moving into the museum or gallery context. Thinking about making film not for a single screen but across multiple screens,” she said. “He went from three channels, still projected onto a flat wall like a triptych of paintings. Then he started moving into the space and composing it onto screens that are much larger and arranged in a room, so that it becomes much more encompassing and embracing. It’s no coincidence that he started moving into the multichannel direction with the advent of the internet and social media.”
Thematically, the work also became more complex and open to an array of interpretations. “His work always focuses on the human condition. The piece (‘Ten Thousand Waves’) thinks about global migration, in this case focusing on China,” she said. “It’s wonderfully engrossing, poetic, haunting, but also a beautifully lyrical meditation on the consequences of the other side of capitalism.”
The most impactful piece for her is “Lessons of the Hour,” particularly one sequence toward the end of the film. Fearon as Douglass is delivering a formal speech to a white audience in a theater setting in 1852. In a potent indictment on hypocrisy in America, he tells them how a slave feels about the Fourth of July. “A day that reveals to him more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. The celebration is a sham.”
That scene is contrasted with footage from Black Lives Matter protests, fireworks celebrations and iconic Americana, fusing the past with the present on different screens.
“I found the juxtapositions of these images as they flow in and out to be incredibly powerful,” she said. “The fireworks segment nearly moved me to tears.”
“Isaac Julien: I Dream a World” a moving-image exhibition in the form of immersive, multichannel film and video installations, opened April 12 and runs through July 13, at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr. For more information, hours, and to get tickets go to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Website.
The ten installations are a powerful experience worth revisiting, possibly breaking up the visit by going for a walk and having lunch in the middle, or in multiple visits to the DeYoung. Membership makes this possible without having to buy multiple admissions.
A list with transcripts and map of the ten installations can be found by clicking the links.
The DeYoung offers an article, “5 Works to Know by Artist and Filmmaker Isaac Julien”
Isaac Julien “Black Madonna / New Negro Aesthetic (Once Again… Statues Never Die),” 2022 Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, 59 x 78 3/4 in. (150 x 200 cm) © Isaac Julien Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
Watch the opening day, April 12, 2025, conversation discussed above.
Curator Claudia Schmucki biography.
She has written numerous books. “Isaac Julien: I Dream a World” can be pre-ordered for early fall delivery. Contributors include Claudia Schmucki, B. Ruby Rich, Hilton Als, and Dan Hicks. Buy from the Museum or your local independent bookstore in person or via Bookshop. Information about her books here. 
Noma Faingold is a writer and photographer who lives in Noe Valley. A native San Franciscan who grew up in the Sunset District, Faingold is a frequent contributor to the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon newspapers, among others. She is obsessed with pop culture and the arts, especially film, theater and fashion. Noma has written about Tamara de Łempicka and singer/songwriters Janis Joplin, Diane Warren and Linda Smith for EatDrinkFilms.
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