When artist Torkwase Dyson was first invited to design for the exhibition location “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” He had no prior history with the upcoming Costume Institute Show, Department of Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in Chicago and grew up in the south, Dyson is primarily a painter, sculptor and theorist.
“I don’t have a big personal history with fashion,” she accepts with laughter during our conversation. “I learned to do a lot of work on this exhibition.”
In fact, Dyson had never seen a costume institute exhibition before, so he made a directed tour of the previous spring. “Sleeping Beauties: Rewalking Fashion” To achieve a sense of scale and scope. At the same time, Monica Miller, the co-collectors of “Superfine”, sent a copy of their own book to Dyson, Das to Fashion: Black Dandyism and The Styling of Black Diasporic IdentityWhich serves as scholars and ideological foundations for the new show. Subsequently, Dyson says, there was an artistic awakening.
“It opened a door for ambition that I did not recognize at that moment,” Dyson tells me. “I don’t work design – I am a visual artist. But walking in ‘Sleeping Beauties’ was like entering another world. Its intensive was inspiring. It thought me what could be experienced within my own sculpture language.”
Although the Dyson Exhibition Design came to the project with no background, their work has long been the notion of space, architecture and black liberation, including institutions. The Whitney Museum And Pace gallery, “Superfine” The Commission gave him a chance to convert a 10,000-square-foot gallery into a direct conversation with some dynamic, living and black self-fashion for centuries.
Instead of designing around specific clothing, Dyson began with a concept: “I wanted to take the frame, or to prepare black life, and wanted to use it as a force multiplier,” she explains. From these frames she developed her architectural language, or what she calls her “hyper shapes”: modular forms that can accommodate unknown -scale clothing and objects, maintaining all dynamics, agility and a sense of appearance. “Some shapes think of volumes, others about open air or attachment,” she says. “It was important that each structure could meet the needs of the curator, but can also tell a story on its own.”
