Color Out of Darkness: Ad Reinhardt curated by James Turrell

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.

Professor of art history at California State Long Beach Matthew Simms is a specialist in European and North American Art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with additional expertise in post-war California art. He has published widely on French modern art, from Antoine-Louis Barye to Paul Cézanne, and more recently on the art and careers of Southern California artists Robert Irwin, Helen Pashgian, and Ed Bereal. Dr. Simms also holds the position of Gerald and Bente Buck West Coast Collector for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. He has collected the papers of, among other artists, Ronald Davis, Ilene Segalove, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, Eduardo Carrillo, Tony DeLap, Charles Arnoldi, Chiura Obata, Tom Marioni, Roland Reiss, and Masami Teraoka.

Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum Alex Bacon is an art historian based in New York City who regularly writes criticism and organizes exhibitions of both contemporary and historical art. Bacon is co-editor, with Hal Foster, of a collection of essays on Richard Hamilton (MIT Press, 2010), as well as the author of texts in various exhibition catalogs and edited volumes. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and has served as a guest critic in the graduate painting departments of the Rhode Island School of Design and AKV/St. Joost. He is currently completing his PhD in art history at Princeton, with a dissertation on the first decade of Frank Stella’s career.

Critic and art historian Phyllis Tuchman teaches and writes about art, particularly sculpture. She has taught at Williams College, Hunter College, and the School of Visual Arts. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.