Isaac Julien: I Dream a World at De Young Museum

Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is the first US retrospective for the British artist known for his immersive, multichannel video installations.

Julien’s films revisit the past to create spaces of cultural memory that invite us to reframe our priorities in the present. In response, we wanted to source typography that was historically-grounded. As a newly acquired FAMSF artwork and one of the centerpieces of the de Young presentation, Lessons of the Hour (2019) served as the catalyst for typographic research. “Lessons of the Hour” is a poetic meditation on the life and work of writer, orator, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. We chose EK Roumald as a typeface that recalls the Scotch Roman typographic tradition of Douglass’s time. Roumald’s contemporary features – most notably its curvature and the softness added to the counterforms to create an almost blurry feel – also served as an appropriate nod to the dreamlike quality of the artist’s work. In constructing the title lockup, we explored treatments that were fragmented, generating a sense of movement or choreography across the page. This was intended to reference the kind of visual rhythm the artworks possess in the multichannel installation format.

The presence of mylar in Once Again… Statues Never Die (2022) led us to incorporate reflective materials into the title wall graphics using chrome vinyl. The gallery didactics were primarily housed in a central atrium, where individual films or pairs of videos branched off in a “choose your own adventure” style. The FAMSF design studio commissioned the fabrication of photographic facsimiles to accompany each didactic text and embedded these aluminum mounted prints into the surrounding text. The composition of text and image employ the same visual rhythm and movement that inspired the title lock-up.