When visitors walk into Torkwase Dyson: Bird and Lava at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the first thing that will catch their eyes is Dyson’s painting “A Place Called Dark Black (Bird and Lava).” Marked by its flowing liquidity, curvilinear lines, and dark colors, Dyson’s work showcases how interstitial spaces, horizontal lines, liquidity, and abstraction evoke themes of containment and expansion. Open until July 10, Dyson’s exhibit at the Kemper offers an array of multimedia work: from sculptures to drawings to four stop-motion animations that reflect Dyson’s urgent need to “feel liquid,” to “feel earthed,” and to “make space.” A common theme threads the varied works together: a desire to start conversations surrounding the agency and the brilliance of Black and brown people’s spatial practices throughout history. To get a more in-depth look at the work, we spoke with the Kemper’s Meredith Malone, who curated the exhibit.
Tell me a little bit about this exhibit and the themes surrounding it.
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[Torkwase Dyson: Bird and Lava] is a solo exhibition that is looking at a body of work by the contemporary artist Torkwase Dyson, who was a New York–based artist. Torkwase is both a painter and a sculptor. She works across a whole variety of mediums, but she definitely generally engages with a range of urgent issues today, including ideas around architecture, specifically ideas around infrastructure, and the social and political impacts of the climate crisis. These are all very contemporary ideas that she’s incorporating into a work, but also importantly, that all her work is very much at the same time grounded and these sort of historical reflections on the agency of Black and brown people—often thinking about the history of enslaved people and their negotiation of spatial practices.
Can you explain that idea of “spatial practices”?
So when we talk about spatial practices, she’s thinking about how these figures historically have negotiated basically the infrastructures around slavery and how they have taken those structures and found a way to work through those structures to find a way towards liberation. And so she’s interested in those stories—in this series, it really starts with this compositional lexicon…these key geometric shapes that she’s using. She’s using squares, trapezoids, and curved lines. So this is kind of the core language. When you see this exhibition, you’ll see her using these shapes over and over again. Her work is abstract, but it also often has this undercurrent of these key narratives.
She’s using these core shapes—squares, trapezoids, and curved lines—and these are derived from architectural spaces that were used by individuals to escape slavery. You have one figure named Anthony Box Brown, who shipped himself in a box right from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia in 1849. And so that’s where the square is coming from for her. Or you have another figure, Harriet Jacobs, who had to spend seven years in an attic before she could then liberate herself. So that attic space is where you get this trapezoid or the triangle that comes up over and over again. And then this curved shape that you’re going to see in a lot of her work, too, is seen as a reference to the hull of a ship. And that’s another figure, Anthony Burns, who escaped from Richmond to Boston in 1854 by hiding in the hull of a ship. But then more broadly, that idea of this curved shape comes up over and over again for her because you could see it as a ship on the water. There’s a reference to the Middle Passage. So she’s taking these concrete histories of these enslaved people, and she’s using that as a way as a starting point to then derive these geometric forms, which then she uses over and over again, and she uses them in meaning. She uses them in drawings and collages. She uses them even in the stop-motion animation videos that we’re showing the exhibition amendment. Recently, she’s really used them to create architectural models or sculptures. She’s creating these kinds of architectural installation spaces, too, moving on to the scale of architecture itself.
How does this work relate to the social impacts and issues of climate change and architecture?
So those shapes are coming from this more historical look back, but for her, we are never divorced from history. We’re still living in its wake. And so there are still fundamental infrastructural inequities that are happening, and she sees this in climate change. More Black and brown people are inordinately harmed by the effects of climate change…These two histories are kind of coming together fundamentally around ideas of infrastructure, and these people and populations that have had to be incredibly creative within these tight constraints to find freedom, to find liberation, to find a way to live. There’s push and pull between confinement and liberation, and that’s fundamental to the kind of work that she’s creating.
Why do you think it’s important to show works that explore these histories of Black resistance and spaces of self-liberation?
I think it’s incredibly important, especially on a university campus. Universities across the country are examining their own connections to the history of slavery, and that’s definitely a project that [Wash. U.] is committed to looking at as well. But I think Torkwase is one of numerous artists today who are directly engaging. I think it’s interesting to see some artists working on a much more representational scale, where there’s a direct reference to figuration and to narrative, and I think that Torwase is taking a slightly different path. But I think for her, it’s interesting that we were talking about this. Her work is abstract, and there’s a whole canonical history of abstraction that you can talk about from a Western perspective. But, for her, abstraction works not only on this aesthetic level, but she’s also thinking about it on a much more conceptual level. In this poem that she wrote and we have reproduced on a wall in the exhibition, she has this last line: “It’s time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world building toward liberation and revolution.” For her, abstraction is itself a form of liberation. It is a way of thinking in a different way, and thinking towards a different future.
In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava.
And it is the density of Black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity.
Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make.
It’s time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world building toward liberation and revolution.
-Torkwase Dyson
How do you think that working across these multiple mediums helps emphasize Dyson’s mission?
When we thought of this exhibition, it started with a painting that the Kemper owns. It’s an important painting that was an early painting from a series that we acquired about two years ago. And then I wanted to show all of these different ways that she’s engaging with that core geometry, all these different media that she’s using, and we thought of it almost like a laboratory or workshop space. So if you come in you can see the shapes, but you can also really see her process and her interest in materiality—like that’s a huge part for her too. She talks a lot about how these paintings and everything in the series has a level of the haptic—meaning that you can see how she’s layering and the thickness of paint. And this idea of the liquidity of paint is an important thing for her too. She’ll start with a painting that’s on the ground, like the painting in our exhibition. It’s a lot of thin layers where she’s pushing and pulling the paint, and then she’ll stand it up. And that’s where she puts these more architectural lines on the work itself. So there’s the painting and that kind of abstract push and pull with the liquid liquidity of the paint, but there’s other parts of it where it’s incredibly thick. It almost looks like oil or something. Then she’s putting on these much more refined lines that are a reference to architectural drawing. The idea was that the show here would really be a way for you to see the whole range, how she approaches her work. She’s working across media all the time. Each one fundamentally informs the other.
Tell me about the curatorial process. How were you able to narrow Dyson’s work down to the pieces in this exhibition?
We had this painting, and I knew that she was going to be doing this project in St. Louis for Counterpublic 2023 and I wanted to capitalize on that moment of having this really super cool project that you’ll have in the city and how we could use our space to tell that story of Bird and Lava in a bigger way. I went and did a visit with her last summer, and she does have a really robust practice of drawing. That’s something that she’s always been working on. So I knew going in that she had these collages, and I didn’t know how many she had. We just spent an afternoon and I went through whatever she had, and then I picked a lot of them. I had seen an artist talk that she had done online during the pandemic where she showed a clip of one of these animations, and I just loved them. And I wanted to know if she had more and if she was doing more of them, and so she showed that she had four. We’re showing all four of the ones that she has, which she hasn’t really shown or projected before. Even she was saying she hadn’t seen them off of her own phone.
And then it was really [Dyson who] came up with the suggestion of putting in the maquettes, which are these small, sculptural works. She had a body of them that she made. Sometimes they’re directly connected to a project that she will then create on the larger scale, either a sculpture or an architectural installation. So she had a range of them…it was her idea to put this beautiful table in the show, and put in the small maquettes. She came and she organized them how she wanted, so they really make a striking comparison—these three-dimensional sculptural objects to the two-dimensional works that you see all around.
Do you have a favorite piece from the exhibit?
Well, you know, the piece that we own (“A Place Called Dark Black (Bird and Lava)”) was one of my favorites. I love everything, but I will say one of the things I’m really excited about is these stop-motion animations. I love how she came to make them and I just think that they’re super engaging. I think that, for me, they open up even another dimension of the works that we have in the gallery, because there is a video space. I just love watching them. I think they’re fairly low-tech, because she was making them kind of out of necessity during the pandemic with her phone. Three of them are silent, but one of them has a soundtrack that she actually composed. So there is the sonic element that comes in a little bit. You can see it here, but I think it’s something that she’s been more and more interested in as well. And when people go see the Counterpublic installation, there’s a whole sonic level that works in that installation as well. So I hope it’s another point of contact.
What would you most like people to know about Bird and Lava?
I just think that I want people—if they don’t know Torkwase’s work—to have an exciting experience and to be intrigued by what they see in that gallery and to want to go out and learn more about her. Learn more about the histories that she’s engaging with, about how she really has this deep understanding of these coordinates of Black life, and how she’s interpreting that through these abstract works. And [I hope] if people come away with more questions about the histories of these people that she’s talking about or her projects in general, that they leave and want to go see the architectural work that is out in the city itself. That would be my goal.
