This season’s events feature practices navigating the legacies and possibilities of American infrastructure, from ecological systems and transit hubs to community facilities and social networks.

Torkwase Dyson is a painter whose multimedia practice explores ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Her works examine environmental racism, as well as the history and future of Black spatial liberation strategies, grappling with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated by Black and Brown people. 

Completed projects include: 

• Studio South Zero, a mobile solar-powered art studio that Dyson drove across the country to explore sites impacted by climate change and environmental injustice
• Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice, an exhibition with an accompanying series of talks and workshops with architects, artists, environmentalists, poets, and scholars
• Liquid A Place, a collaborative performance and multimedia installation that served as a stage for artists to engage with issues of environmental racism, spatial liberation, and sensoria. 

This program will be live streamed from A Liquid Belonging, Dyson’s new site-specific show at Pace’s New York gallery. According to the gallery, these never-before-seen sculptures and paintings “reflect the artist’s expansions of her theories on movement, geography, perception, and material” and “address how individuals negotiate and negate various systems and spatial orders.”

Dyson has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (Hall Art Foundation), Colby College Museum of Art, the Graham Foundation, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the California African American Museum. She is The Architectural League’s vice president for visual arts.

The program will be moderated by Mario Gooden. Gooden is the director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design and a professor of professional practice at Columbia GSAPP, where he is also interim MArch program director and co-director of the Global Africa Lab. He is the president of The Architectural League.

Support

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.