Torkwase Dyson with Robert Shane

A painter whose compositions address the continuity of movement, climate change, infrastructure, and architecture, Torkwase Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated by black and brown bodies. These subjects produce abstractions that explore the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies and environmental racism. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through environments become expressive and discursive structures within her work. Dyson builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes and configuring geometric elements through improvisation and reflection. The subtle use of atmospheric color, lines, and scale in the paintings invites the eye to consider the conceptual and corporeal knowledge of space in real time.

Art critic, curator, and art historian Robert R. Shane received his PhD in art history and criticism at Stony Brook University where he studied with Donald Kuspit. Robert frequently writes The Brooklyn Rail, and his scholarly work on gender and the politics of shame has been published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. He is currently associate professor of art history at the Center for Art and Design, Albany, NY, and a 2021 Guest Curatorial Consultant at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany. Robert’s current book project in progress is titled Mirroring Mothers: Witnessing Maternal Subjectivity in Contemporary Art.