MAKERS series: Lewis Watts + Dewey Crumpler

MAKERS series exposes the creative and often raw process of individual making by exploring the origins and processes of creativity and the interplay between inspiration, innovation with an emphasis on the act of making itself. Presentations and discussions with diverse practitioners working in the arts, or at the intersection of architecture and design, will broaden our assumptions of the complexities of making at scale—to reveal insights into materials and methods, digital and nature-based technologies, and the highly personal journey between vision and process to reach creative outcomes.

Reflecting Forward : Tracing the Past

Join us to learn about the decades of seeing, artistic expression and cultural documentation inspired by the pursuit of telling societally important stories. 

If making is representing, it begins with seeing and asking different questions. Lewis Watts photographs people, faces, cultural landscapes and moments as visual evidence to show the viewer how the present becomes history, and in turn, history reshapes our present understanding of culture and humanity.  Dewey Crumpler shows us that certain objects, made familiar in history, can gain heightened meaning to act as metaphors symbolizing resistance and physical integrity. By addressing the idea of subjugation in America–objects can be reframed as cultural self-fulfillment, autonomy and spiritual development. 

Speaker

Lewis Watts

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, curator, traveler and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Lewis’ research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily within the frame of the African Diaspora. A prolific documentary photographer, and visual historian Lewis’ work includes portraits of artists, activists, authors, and musicians. Lewis’ work is an invitation to reflect on our own lives and connections to the people and the spaces we inhabit–and the history that holds meaning. As archivist, Lewis tells the story of San Francisco’s Fillmore in the heyday of Black culture, music and community.

Work capturing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Lewis’ photographs reflect his surroundings as a witness, capturing the intimate cultural and human experiences of individuals and the effects on the built environment in the wake of the storm, showing both the devastation and the resilience of New Orleans’ people. 

Lewis Watts' publications include: co-author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” by Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2020, New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition, a post-Hurricaine Katrina conversation, by University of California Press, 2013,  Portraits Edition One, Berkeley, 2020 and collaborated with Landscape Architect Walter Hood in Black Landscapes Matter, UVA Press 2020. Watts’ work has been exhibited at and has collections at the SFMOMA the Cité de la Musique (Paris, France), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, Louisiana), the Oakland Museum of California, the Neuberger Museum of Art and many others nationally and internationally.

Dewey Crumpler

Dewey Crumpler is a Bay Area artist and educator creating surreal experiences that merge traditional painting techniques with video, mixed media and sculpture–as a self described “Maker”. Dewey
continually and closely examines how objects serve as sites for exploring what it means to be Black, shedding light on the aesthetic freedom that contributes to Black liberation. His work examines issues of globalization, cultural co-modification, themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression, which continue to transcend boundaries; exploring how memories surrounding blackness shapeshift through space and time. By using object abstraction and repetition, Dewey illustrates the continuity of these symbolic forms. Dewey Crumpler was an Associate Professor of Painting of the San Francisco Art Institute (he taught Kehinde Wiley, known for painting Barack Obama's presidential portrait). As a young man, Dewey’s formal practice began as a city muralist, studying under the late Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His work is included in permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, CA; and the California African American Museum. Digital images of his murals were included in the 2017 Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation. Among many awards, Dewey received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a Flintridge Foundation Award, and the Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship Eureka Award. Included in the many exhibitions: Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies at the Dr. David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Avant-Garde: Those Ahead of Their Time at Jenkins Johnson Gallery and People Make This Place: SFAI Stories, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Dewey has a forthcoming retrospective at the Museum of African Diaspora (MOAD) in September 2026, curated by Key Joe Lee.

Moderator

Lise de Vito

Lise de Vito’s design career spans decades in the San Francisco Bay Area, as co-owner of Zack | de Vito Architecture + Construction, with award-winning architecture and interior design projects across residential, commercial, and vertically integrated design-build development. Alongside her professional practice, Lise is a multidisciplinary artist as well as co-owner of a San Francisco–based gift+art shop, where research, curation, and making actively inform her creative interests.

In collaboration with AIASF and the Center for Architecture+Design, Lise created, curates and moderates the MAKERS series, highlighting the storytelling and journeys of diverse makers and creative practitioners at scale.