Exhibition text 

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Artist Torkwase Dyson engages the Graham Foundation galleries as both a site of installation for her experimental sculptures and drawing practice, as well as an incubator for discussion. Through her use of abstraction, Dyson extends the art historical cannon to ask questions about what is at stake for the production of form in the context of geography as shaped by contemporary economic and political climates. Weaving together different modes of inquiry from art, architecture, geography, and other disciplines, the exhibition initiates dialogue about environmentalism, race, and spatiality in the Anthropocene era of global crisis. The Wynter-Wells School at the Graham Foundation activates the historic Madlener House as a site for installation and an incubator for discussion.

Throughout, the project introduces Dyson’s concepts of “Black Compositional Thought”— the complexities of the movement and displacement of people of color, a population disproportionately impacted by global warming—and “hypershapes” a philosophical theory based on hyperobjects that question fundamental understandings of what things are and may become. On-site workshops through the Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice with architects, artists, environmentalists, poets, and scholars, create opportunities for the public to directly engage with Dyson. These workshops invite collective investigation into how people move through space, how space is used, how use suggests new forms, how these forms are discovered through drawing, how these drawn forms provide context for tackling urgent questions currently impacting all global citizens.