Torkwase Dyson
Torkwase Dyson is a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture deeply rooted in the spatial strategies of Black and Indigenous peoples across the world as foundations of invention towards livable worlds. For Counterpublic 2023, Dyson’s immersive architectural and sonic installation, Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), is directly inspired by the legacy of Scott Joplin and ragtime music, a syncopated blend of classical piano and African polyrhythms with mathematical precision evolved in response to the oppressive conditions of minstrel shows and credited as the first truly “American” musical form. Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin) likewise creates a syncopated experience of the landscape with multiple vantage points along its structure, immersed in the discordant environment of St. Louis. Further, Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin) aims to make transhistorical connections between Black liberation strategies formed to refuse slavery’s spatial violence and its structural continuities in the present ecological crisis. The work continues to expand on Dyson’s goal to speak to the poetics of both the quotidian and the existential realities of climate change.
Viewers are encouraged to visit the parallel exhibition, Bird and Lava, on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin) is supported in part by the VIA Art Fund.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. In addition to participating in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; and Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont.
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