Isaac Julien Gets an Electrifying US Retrospective at Long Last

Perhaps you don’t associate Blaxploitation filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles with Renaissance painting? I didn’t, at least not before last week, but now I’ll never be able to unhitch Van Peebles from the image of him admiring The Ideal City, a quattrocento painting of an open plaza.That image figures prominently in Isaac Julien’s video installation Baltimore (2003), one of 13 transfixing works in Julien’s newly opened retrospective at San Francisco’s de Young Museu