Torkwase Dyson

GRAY is pleased to announce Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory. For the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Torkwase Dyson debuts a pair of monumental sculptures, new paintings, and constructions in glass and wood. Of Line and Memory opens at GRAY Chicago with a public reception for the artist on November 8 and remains on view through January 25, 2025.

Dyson works across the disciplines of painting, drawing, installation and sculpture, distilling the spatial and affective residues of diasporic histories to envision new modes of environmental liberation. Dyson approaches her work spatially and architecturally, crafting the gallery environment to holistically shape the viewers’ experience. Through an improvisational process of mindful abstraction, which she calls “Black Compositional Thought,” Dyson seeks to create work that is fluid, abstract, poetic, and open to possibility. “If there is systemic oppression, there must be systemic liberation,” says the artist, “and I am in that zone… trying to condition myself in this relationship of a transhistorical liberation practice.” 1

Of Line and Memory draws from Dyson’s lived experiences navigating Chicago’s lakefront, river systems, and urban architecture. Dyson delves into the entrenched histories of the city’s waterways and built environment, which she distills, refines, and reduces into geometric shapes and painterly abstractions, a methodology evident in both her two— and three— dimensional work.

Of Line and Memory offers an immersion into the poetic and visceral states of the constructed environment as Dyson orchestrates a dynamic interplay of materials. Using a restricted palette, Dyson unlocks a sense of “state change” as the blacks and dark grays in her paintings nimbly transition from thinly poured layers of deep color to the opacity of thick impasto. Her sculptures similarly balance the solidity of wood and steel with the translucence of cast glass.
 

ABOUT TORKWASE DYSON
American interdisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973 Chicago) combines expressive mark-making and geometric abstraction to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Working across the disciplines of painting, sculpture and architecture, Dyson deconstructs, distills, and interrogates the built environment, exploring how individuals, particularly black and brown people, negotiate, negate, and transform systems and spatial order. Throughout her work and research, Dyson confronts issues of environmental liberation and envisions a path toward a more equitable future. 

One of today’s most innovative artists, Dyson’s work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at ‘T’ Space Rhinebeck, New York; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington, Vermont; Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg, Germany; and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK.  

Group exhibitions and biennials include the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK; Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Desert X, California; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington DC; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others. Her architectural sculpture Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground), commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s fifth floor terrace through February 9, 2025. Torkwase Dyson will create the conceptual design for The Costume Institute’s Spring 2025 exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Public collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington, DC; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts. Dyson studied sociology and social work at Tougaloo College, Mississippi, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Yale School of Art. Dyson lives and works in Beacon, New York.

PUBLICATION
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, to be published in 2025.