Black Compositional Thought and Systems of Spatial Navigation

Torkwase Dyson in Conversation with Mabel Wilson. Episode 76 features an excerpt from a conversation between Professor Mabel O. Wilson and New York-based artist Torkwase Dyson about her recently opened exhibition 1919: Black Water. On view at Columbia GSAPP’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery through December 14, 2019, the exhibition includes new paintings, sculptures, and drawings that respond to the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer” of 1919, a period of heightened racial violence across the United States. Dyson creates visual and material systems that explore relationships between bodily movement and architecture, with an emphasis on the ways that black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space. During the conversation, they discuss systems of subjugation within architectural forms, and ways in which spatial composition is used as a tool for self-liberation. A transcript of the full conversation is published in the exhibition brochure and can be found on the School’s website.