Un/Sent Stream: a review of Torkwase Dyson's recent exhibition, Dear Henry; Davidson Gallery; March 15–May 5, 2018

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Notes on contributor

Sarah Jane Cervenak is an associate professor, jointly appointed in the Women’s and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies programs at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her areas of research and teaching are feminist theory, Black studies, performance studies, visual culture and philosophy. Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Gathering: Arts of Ungiven Life queries the Black radical, feminist potential of gathering in post-1970s Black literary and visual arts. In addition to her single and co-authored articles that have appeared in journals such as Feminist Studies, Women and Performance and New Centennial Review, she is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke University Press, September 2014). She is also co-editor, with J. Kameron Carter, of the Duke University Press book series, Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study.

Notes

1 Dear Henry was on view at Davidson Gallery (521 W. 26th Street, New York) until 5 May 2018. The author would like to thank the artist Torkwase Dyson for her amazing art and generosity, along with Davidson Gallery, for permission to reprint the art images featured here. Here I thank Charles Davidson and Brittany LoSchiavo (Davidson Gallery, NYC) for their kind and timely attention to my many queries and for sending the images of the art. Just as importantly, I thank Dr. Christina Sharpe, Dr. Jennifer Nash, Dr. Mercy Romero, Dr. J. Kameron Carter, Sarah Richter and the editorial collective of Women and Performance for their generosities of genius, time and energy in reading the review essay and providing feedback and support.

2 The Whitney Museum of American Art describes Dyson's Water Table Paintings as “transform[ations of] geologic diagrams of underground water systems into abstractions of the earth's interconnected layers” (Whitney Museum of American Art 2018). Geologically defined, a water table is defined as a region that “below a certain depth, the ground, if it is permeable enough to hold water, is saturated with water. The upper surface of this zone of saturation is called the water table. The saturated zone beneath the water table is called an aquifer, and aquifers are huge storehouses of water” (The USGS Water School 2018).

3 This notion of “private planning” is inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's writings in their book, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013).

4 I refer here to Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016); Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World” (2014); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

5 The phrasing “tired and thirsty fugitive” used here in relation to Dyson's art is inspired by Fred Moten's meditations on Piet Mondrian's Victory Boogie Woogie and the “lonesome fugitives” communing with/in it (Moten 2009).