Isaac Julien:
I Dream a World
Over the last 25 years, pioneering artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (b. 1960, London) has created immersive, multichannel video installations. Celebrated for his poetic visual narratives, Julien explores power, politics, and personal experience through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
For the exhibition Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, I worked closely with Leslie Dutcher, director of publications at the de Young and Legion of Honor. Brought on as project editor for the exhibition catalog, I edited essays by Claudia Schmuckli, chief curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum, as well as contributions by Hilton Als, B. Ruby Rich, and Dan Hicks, among others. The catalog features newly commissioned essays and archival materials, many previously unpublished, that relate to the works in the exhibition and give insight into Julien’s work and process.
Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a US museum setting, Isaac Julien: I Dream a World charts the artist’s evolution from a filmmaker working in a single-channel cinematic context to an artist redefining the possibilities of the filmic experience through spellbindingly beautiful and complex choreographies of image, movement, and sound. It emphasizes Julien’s shared concerns across the Black diaspora with the inclusion of works shot in and across the Americas and the Caribbean that situate his work in a global dialogue. By addressing the pressing social and political issues of our time, in particular the movement of peoples and ideas across different continents, times, and spaces, Julien asks viewers to reconsider the grand historical narratives of the global north anew.