Torkwase Dyson
Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." In 1999 she received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA from Yale School of Art in painting/printmaking in 2003. In 2016, Dyson was elected to the board of the Architectural League of New York  as Vice President of Visual Arts. In 2017, she was on the faculty of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a visiting critic at Yale School of Art. Projects. Studio South Zero. Studio South Zero (SSZ) is a solar-powered, mobil art studio Dyson uses in her installations. Conditions of Fresh Water. Conditions of Fresh Water (2015-2017) is a project about "black Southern geography and the struggle for environmental justice." The Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice. The 2018 Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Justice, named for Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter and American civil  rights leader Ida B. Wells, is a two-week series of classes, discussions, and experiments held at the Drawing Center. The Wynter-Wells School. In 2018, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Arts presented an exhibition of Dyson's work building off of her two-week residency at the Drawing Center, "Winter Term". The exhibition consisted of new site-specific drawings and a series of programming under the title "The Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation", as part of Dyson's pedagogical approach to art-making, consisting of a series of workshops, lectures, and an open studio  where Dyson would actively produce and alter the work on view in front of the public.