Torkwase Dyson channels South Shore for stunning new show

Torkwase Dyson thinks a lot about shapes. How, for example, the contours of memory change over time. Or how Chicago’s Lake Michigan shoreline shifts with rising tides and eroding dunes.

She thinks too about the broader architectures that have been weaponized against Black Americans — the designs of individual slave ships, the redlining maps that rendered it near impossible for Black Chicagoans to secure a mortgage — and how those configurations have shaped contemporary society.

For her new solo show, “Of Line and Memory” at GRAY gallery in the Fulton Market district, Dyson, 51, mines both the large geometries of history and a more intimate topography that reflects her childhood growing up in South Shore. Dyson, who now lives and works in upstate New York, started by simply walking Chicago streets. “I thought, ‘I’m going to remember the might in which the Black community built me up,’” she says. “‘And then I’m going to also think about the might of the hyper-city of industry.’”

Among the memories that surfaced: driving in her grandfather’s Cadillac with the windows down and spending sun-drenched afternoons at the South Shore Cultural Center — then called South Shore Country Club — with her extended family.

“It was home to so many of us who lived and made community in South Shore. It was an extension of our homes,” she says. “What made it important to me was how we locked together in those spaces. Blanket magic.”

While those reflections inform the 17 new sculptures and paintings in this formidable and stunning show, they are not immediately apparent. That’s intentional. As an artist, Dyson is not interested in literally translating her ephemeral experiences into physical form. Instead, she describes the work as a form of channeling or spiritual reflection.

“Torkwase is an artist that you can read and think deeply about what she asserts in her forms and in her practice. There is so much research and deliberation behind it,” says Valerie Carberry, a partner at GRAY who first started talking to Dyson about the show in 2021. “But you can also walk into the gallery and just experience something so powerful and formally beautiful. It’s both those things at once — beauty and simplicity and formal rigor.”

Dyson, in her own words, shared the stories behind some of the works featured in “Of Line and Memory.” Her comments were lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

The Clearing 2, 2024

Dyson: This my second clearing painting. The series is named from Toni Morrison’s "Beloved," when the character Baby Suggs takes her sermon in the clearing. I was thinking about how Toni Morrison talks about this clearing, and the way in which the children, the women, the men [in the novel] have these transformations. This collective state changes from vulnerability to euphoria to sensoria. The painting uses the gallery architecture to produce a sort of fourth dimension. It sits low against the white walls, and from a distance, it looks like a sort of another space. It makes space elastic.

Aya, 2024

Dyson: I just couldn’t name this piece. I was going through my research, and I thought I could pull a name from my notes, titles of the landmarks, something my grandfather showed me, or grandma. Anything. But I couldn't — it just all seemed not right. And then [this memory] just popped into my mind: When I was a teenager, my mom was on [a Fulbright scholarship] in Ghana. I’d gone to visit, and I also visited Elmina [a port city involved in the transatlantic slave trade]. I had been thinking about [traditional Ghanaian] Adinkra symbols and saw the name Aya and stored it away. The fact that Aya came up to me, especially because I experienced the architecture of the transatlantic slave trade in Elmina with the Door of No Return, really made sense to me. I felt very sure that the name could hold this piece.

Hypershapes, 2024

Dyson: The title of these sculptures comes from a Hortense Spillers quote from "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual":

When I read that, I was like, “Oh, my God, that is such a brilliant statement.” It's such a project. And I wanted to get inside of it. Hypershapes [a term Dyson has coined for her geometric works that explore the history of Black resistance and liberation] are my way of doing that. These pieces feel like they have might in them.

Sometimes, people say, “Why geometry?” and it’s so puzzling. Ancient agriculture to our own genetic system, the physical to the metaphysical, everything is geometry. There’s so much space to play and wonder.

Elly Fishman is a freelance writer and the author of  “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America.”