Torkwase Dyson\u2019s art practice could be viewed as a form of critical theory. Take her major theoretical concept, \u201cBlack Compositional Thought.\u201d With this term, Dyson refers to spatial strategies that respond to the phenomenological condition of Black unfreedom. She is interested not only in the \u201covert\u201d appearances of structural racism but also in the infrastructure<\/em> produced by anti-Black expropriation. Waterways, roads, buildings, trade routes\u200a\u200a\u2014Dyson foregrounds how the expropriated labour of Black people has terraformed the landscape and constructed the built environment. In such a condition of total subjugation, she asks, what kinds of alternate perceptual maps of the world have Black people devised to steal freedom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dyson seeks to shift from the pictorial plane to that of the sensorial or spatial in order to address this question. In doing so, her work eludes another form of subjugation: the \u201cregime of representation,\u201d as scholar David Lloyd would put it. Whether presented as a series or as singular, monumental works, Dyson\u2019s paintings tend to restrict themselves to her signature colour palette\u2014blacks, greys, some moody blues\u2014and call attention to the mark-making practices of the medium. Diagrams suggesting an engineer\u2019s plans impose structure, however provisional, across lagoons of paint. These are works that cite the history of painterly abstraction\u2014even the bold white lines of the diagrams evoke Barnett Newman\u2019s zips\u200a\u2014yet are not beholden to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although abstraction is the subject of her practice, Dyson has recently said that she is not an abstract artist. After all, the history of \u201cabstraction\u201d is vexed: the slave trade abstracted human beings into parcels of economic value\u200a\u200a\u2014commodities to be bartered at auction. Still, abstraction can also permit a perceptual reboot. Her \u201chypershapes,\u201d true to the large-scale sculpture format, force us to consider our embodied relationship with the object before us. Neither optimistic nor cynical, Dyson\u2019s ambivalent attachment to abstraction is also dialectical: her works lay bare abstraction\u2019s force, yet employ it toward fugitive ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based in New York City, Connor Spencer is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. His writing is published or forthcoming in Esse<\/em> arts + opinions<\/em>, Post45<\/em>, and College Literature<\/em>. He is a Beinecke Research Fellow at Yale University in 2025\u200a\u2013\u200a26.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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