Photo: Mitro Hood, courtesy of the artist & Baltimore Museum of Art
Torkwase Dyson’s art practice could be viewed as a form of critical theory. Take her major theoretical concept, “Black Compositional Thought.” With this term, Dyson refers to spatial strategies that respond to the phenomenological condition of Black unfreedom. She is interested not only in the “overt” appearances of structural racism but also in the infrastructure produced by anti-Black expropriation. Waterways, roads, buildings, trade routes —Dyson 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?
