Dawn Williams Boyd Reverses America's Racial Narrative @ Fort Gansevoort

Dawn Williams Boyd
Abduction, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
45 x 67.5 inches

text by Hank Manning

In FEAR at Fort Gansevoort, Dawn Williams Boyd inverts American history, imagining a parallel universe where Black oppressors imported white slaves and have maintained an economy predicated on race-based exploitation for centuries. Her cloth paintings, made with textiles imported from Africa, all closely resemble canonical American ephemera, including historical photographs and advertisements. Maintaining this color-inverting framework, the gallery, for its third solo exhibition with Boyd, has painted its typically white walls black. 

The exhibition quickly succeeds in making us hyperaware of our racial biases. The scenes depicted—enslaved people chained together on ships, hooded horsemen celebrating lynchings, peaceful protestors attacked by police and civilians—are so ingrained in our memories that we instinctively assign roles before noticing Boyd has reversed them. Even knowing the artist’s intent, standing before these explicit works, our minds still resist the uncanny world she constructs. 

 

Dawn Williams Boyd
Brainwashed, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
66 x 43.5 inches

 

In addition to these violent scenes, Boyd highlights the psychological violence that racism perpetuates in relation to the commercialization of cultural tropes. In a piece titled Brainwashed, a young Black girl, holding a black bar of soap, asks a white slave, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy Soap?” We are directly confronted with the immediate qualities we assign to the colors black and white, as well as how these perceptions affect one’s feelings of self-worth, particularly when learned at a young age.

Dawn Williams Boyd
Cultural Appropriation, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
47 x 58 inches

More than 150 years after the de jure end of slavery in America, economic and social inequalities persist. In keeping with this reality, Boyd’s textile works generally proceed chronologically through history, but they offer no hint of progress toward integration or equality; the racial divide remains unambiguous. She further underscores the role of seemingly benevolent industries, like entertainment and medicine, in perpetuating racial inequality. We see white subjects forced into society’s most exploited roles, from dancing in banana skirts in service of the hegemonic class (at a Prohibition era nightclub in Harlem), to being the subjects of gruesome gynecological research (imitating the work of Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology” who performed studies on enslaved Black women). In the real world, Black patients disproportionately lack access to the advances their exploitation made possible.

Dawn Williams Boyd
The Lost Cause Mythos, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
56 x 70.5 inches

In The Lost Cause Mythos, a reframed Gone With the Wind features a white mammy serving a Black Scarlett O’Hara. Boyd addresses the power of art in shaping and reinforcing societal myths, however, she refuses to entertain the “happy slave” stereotype, instead portraying a despondent attendant. White characters lose their individuality; in settings from the beginning of the slave trade to the present day, men and women sport identical short blond hair and appear either nearly nude or in plain white garments. This homogenization dehumanizes them, treating them as props devoid of personality. Their Black counterparts, by contrast, have diverse hairstyles and elaborate clothing in a variety of colors, with red—here a symbol of power—especially prevalent.

Today, the US federal government and many state governments are attacking DEI initiatives, legal protections secured by the Civil Rights movement, and the honest teaching of American history, denigrating attempts to right historical wrongs as “reverse racism.” Boyd’s stark work puts these unsubstantiated claims into perspective. It asserts the degree to which most Americans underestimate the ongoing legacy of systemic racism and emphasizes the role of emotion in our material world. We see fear in the eyes of everyone, from those experiencing the horrors below deck on slave ships to a fragile ruling class who feels existentially entitled to their privilege and is terrified of losing it. 

Dawn Williams Boyd: FEAR is on view through January 24 at Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York

Garish Queerness as a Mode of Restoration in Pierre le Riche's New Show @ Ronewa Art Projects in Berlin

In Pierre le Riche’s current exhibition, In Four Places at Once, the artist creates vivid figurative wall tapestries that center his queer identity while reflecting on the complexities of belonging in a contemporary world. Identity is woven into and essential to le Riche’s practice; much of his work has been aimed at challenging norms and associations around gender and sexuality and confronting themes of colonialism and white privilege. The group of artworks on show emerged from a period of internal struggle as le Riche acclimatized to a new environment following his move from Cape Town to Aachen, Germany. In this light, le Riche’s choice of tufted yarn as a material, reminiscent of cozy household textiles, feels fitting to conjure a homesick state of yearning and introspection. Le Riche’s use of craft – elsewhere in his practice he also employs embroidery, sewing, and crochet – tosses out outdated notions of gendered art forms. Through his homoerotic content, le Riche pushes back against the conservativeness of a middle-class, suburban upbringing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. His cartoonish nude figures, some sporting exaggerated genitalia, can be read as playfully provocative and unapologetically gay, testing the boundaries of puritanical sensibilities. Simultaneously, his characters are contorted and dislocated in space, imbued with vulnerability, uncertainty, and longing.

In Four Places at Once is on view through March 28th at Ronewa Art Projects, Potsdamer Str. 91, 10785 Berlin.

Teresa Baker's "From Joy to Joy to Joy" Recontextualizes Traditional Materials With Modern Discourse

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

If art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye. The nine technicolor tapestries included in From Joy to Joy to Joy offer a glimpse beneath the visible surface of her ancestral homeland at a terrain imbued with ancient meanings, enriched by tradition and ritual, and animated by that which is sacred and ineffable. Poised between the past and present, recollection and reality, the physical and the spiritual, Baker’s chimerical landscapes inspire a poignant commentary on the ways history, social sensibilities, memory, and mythology mediate our experience of nature.

At first glance, the viewer might find the textiles’ base material, Astroturf, surprising. They’d be right to assume that someone raised nomadically across the national parks of the Midwest wouldn’t have had many encounters with the imitation grass. It wasn’t until Baker moved to Texas a few years ago that she discovered the vibrant, short-pile synthetic turf. Sturdy enough to support layers of paint, weavings, sticks, and stones yet malleable enough to be manipulated into unusual, organic shapes, the plastic mats freed her from the rigid constraints of traditional canvas. The mimetic texture, capable of conjuring wide-open plains and vast grassy fields, alleviated the burden of representation and encouraged abstract experimentation. 

Perhaps the fiber’s most compelling quality is the tension it enacts with the natural embellishments. The ultra-contemporary turf, indicative of an age beholden to plastic and artifice, tempers the traditional materials and recontextualizes them within a modern discourse. Yarn, willow, and buckskin, resources used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, are dispensed like paint to create mesmerizing gestures, patterns, and shapes across the shaggy surface. Despite being restricted to the materiality of yarn to generate variation in her lines and marks, Baker renders a convincingly painterly effect that’s both innovative and recognizable. Nods to certain expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, can be found throughout the exhibition alongside techniques, patterns, and symbols culled from Mandan and Hidatsa customs and craftsmanship. 

While the compositions resist narrative, the haptic engagement with the surface texture, the coloration, and the use of organic shapes ground them in the realm of landscapes and topographical maps. One can identify a winding river in Spring Unforeseen, an island in the middle of a lake in No Walls, or a parched field in Yellow Prairie Grass. At times, the individual threads that bisect the picture plane appear as longitude and latitude lines; other times, they read like hiking trails or the boundaries of various plots of crops. Dappled strands of yarn arranged side by side mimic the fluidity of water, and layers of paint imitate shifting patterns of light and shade. Baker relies on the emotional freight of her color palette to modulate between the feeling of a landscape and the landscape itself. Indigo, as evocative of the ocean and the night sky as it is of melancholy and despair. 

Where the materials resist domination, the strings fray, the Astroturf emerges beneath the painted veneer, and the rawhide curls around the edges, the tapestries feel most alive, charged with an energy and agency of their own invention. Even affixed to the gallery walls, there’s a sense of perpetual unfurling as if the works are still engaged in the act of becoming. To see them this way is to see them as products of a dynamic relationship between artist and material, not a subjugation or domination of the former by the latter. The metaphorical jump from the material to the land itself is difficult to ignore, rendering them poignant examples of symbiotic stewardship. 

On the afternoon of my visit, a rogue red ant crawled assiduously across the brilliant green field in Unwritten. For just a moment, I experienced that exhilarating awareness of being unfathomably small but fundamentally connected to something unfathomably vast and irrefutably miraculous that I’d previously assumed only the grandeur of nature could provoke.

From Joy to Joy to Joy is on view through October 14 @ de boer 3311 E. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles

Randolpho Lamonier Presents My Kind Of Dirty @ Fort Gansevoort

 
 

My Kind Of Dirty is Brazilian artist Randolpho Lamonier’s first exhibition with Fort Gansevoort. This online presentation brings together recent textile works in which Lamonier responds to his upbringing in Contagem, an industrial city in southeastern Brazil, drawing  upon observations of hardship and inequality to create powerful expressions in vivid colors, word  combinations, and raw images. The artist locates his inspiration in an environment where joy grows  proportionally to misfortune and likens his work to diaristic entries. Rendered in deceptively humble handwork and fabrics, the scintillating psychedelic landscapes on view in My Kind Of Dirty celebrate “the  exuberance of life that resists against the necropolitical agenda guided by the current Brazilian government,” the artist has said. In this way, Lamonier’s approach to representation acts as personal revolution, whereby the aura of possibility defines his blueprint for the future. 

My Kind Of Dirty is available for online viewing through May 15

The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain @ Wende Museum in Los Angeles

Working under the radar of the authorities that defined acceptable art, radical women artists in the former Eastern Bloc challenged both socialist and bourgeois ideals and power, as well as a male-dominated canon. Their work was innovative, and the sheer act of making it was a risk. Yet even today, little is known about these courageous and critical artists.

The Medea Insurrection introduces viewers to multifaceted, multifarious work by artists including sculptor and textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland); photographers Sibylle Bergemann (East Germany), Evelyn Richter (East Germany), Zofia Rydet (Poland), and Gundula Schulze-Eldowy (East Germany); mixed-media artists Orshi Drozdik (Hungary) and Anna Daučíková (Czechoslovakia); painter and graphic artist Angela Hampel (East Germany); sound and performance artist Katalin Ladik (Hungary); conceptual artist Natalia LL (Poland); and painter and graphic artist Karla Woisnitza (East Germany).

The Medea Insurrection is on view through April 5, 2020 at the Wende Museum 10808 Culver Boulevard. photographs by Dany Naierman courtesy of the museum.