After being selected to design “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the highly anticipated Spring 2025 fashion exhibition at The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Torkwase Dyson is also presenting her first solo show in Los Angeles: Torkwase Dyson: Here. Running through October 26 at Pace Gallery as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this exhibition expands on Dyson’s 2020 Pace debut, Studies for Bird and Lava, unveiling new two and three-dimensional abstractions focused on architecture, environment, and Black spatial consciousness. Staying true to her interdisciplinary practice, which spans drawing, film, painting, performance, and sculpture, each piece resonates with her poetic interrogation of space — how it’s constructed, inhabited, and resisted. Through the prism of abstraction, Dyson invites all to consider the entanglements of ecology and infrastructure, offering a layered meditation on how Black and Brown bodies move through, and shape, the world around them.

Dyson delves deeply into the contested politics of space, excavating the hidden layers of human geography to reimagine Black liberation through a radical reshaping of strategy. She doesn’t merely question architecture and infrastructure as instruments of control; she unveils how Black and Brown bodies actively shape, experience, and reclaim these spaces. Her latest pieces at Pace LA extend a profound conversation — an ode to submerged Black towns, forgotten yet rippling through history. With a practice that is both deliberate and improvisational, Dyson's paintings resonate with the fluidity of Black abstraction — what she refers to as “Black compositional thought” — capturing its beauty and the spectral echoes of its past.

Dyson’s exploration asks a central question: “If Blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?” By weaving dimensionality, geometric abstraction, and expressive gesture, she transforms histories of displacement, enslavement, and resistance into visual narratives. Her compositional lexicon — a dynamic interplay of curvilinear and rectilinear forms that shape her Bird and Lava series — redefines the boundaries of abstraction. Dyson calls this bold approach “illegal abstraction,” an act of creative defiance that forges a radical vision of liberation and revolution, building new worlds from the fragments of old oppressions.

In her latest body of work, Dyson delves into an innovative fusion of materials, introducing stone-rendered textures that bring a tactile depth to her paintings. These intricate surfaces and geometric forms serve as gateways, evoking visions of new pathways toward liberation. Each piece in her installation for Torkwase Dyson: Here resonates with themes of instability, transformation, and expansion, creating a space for contemplation. Ultimately, Dyson’s works invite viewers to engage not just visually, but meditatively, urging a deeper exploration of the liminal spaces between form, meaning, and possibility.

Beyond the announcement of her upcoming Met Gala exhibition, Dyson’s latest projects continue to reveal the depth of her artistic ambition and conceptual rigor. Her monumental sculpture, Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground), at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, graced the museum’s rooftop with its architecturally inspired geometries, playing with the shifting light of the terrace. Positioned against the backdrop of the Hudson River, the sculpture subtly echoed the intertwined ecological and social histories of New York. Furthermore, Dyson's boundary-pushing vision was also on display at Art Basel’s Unlimited, and she is participating in this year’s Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Photos courtesy of Torkwase Dyson and Pace Gallery.