Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists: Dewey Crumpler and Saidiya Hartman

Artist Dewey Crumpler and author and scholar Saidiya Hartman first met years ago in the Bay Area. In the hour they spent together for this episode, they discuss many subjects, including their work, the responsibilities that attend a calling, the exhaustive process of transformation, and the powerful “hum”—the potent frequency—of Black lives.

Dewey Crumpler is an associate professor of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. His current work examines issues of globalization/cultural co-modification through the integration of digital imagery, video and traditional painting techniques. His works are in the permanent collections of the Bank of America Collection at the Harvey B. Gantt Center, the California African American Museum, the Triton Museum of Art Los Angeles, and the Oakland Museum of California. Crumpler is the recipient of the Flintridge Foundation Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as the Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship Eurekaj Award. He has exhibited most recently with Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Cushion Works, and Derek Eller Gallery.

Saidiya Hartman is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the former director of the Institute for Research on Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and was a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University (2002), a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2016–2017), a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2018) as well as a MacArthur Fellow (2019). She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), for which she won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In addition to her books, she has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, the New Yorker and the Paris Review.

Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for free-form conversations. This monthly video series is a joint production of Artforum and Bookforum.

This episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists in sponsored by MUBI.