Way Over There Inside Me

Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining environmental racism as well as the history and future of back spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. In 2019, Dyson’s solo exhibition I Can Drink the Distance was on view at The Cooper Union, New York, and her work was also presented at the Sharjah Biennial. In addition to participating in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; and Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont.

Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is a Toronto-based poet, novelist, essayist, documentarian, and professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her writing celebrates heterogeneity and engages with issues of social justice as they intersect with gender and race. Her latest novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature and her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, won the Trillium Book Award. These works address art, writing, and, more broadly, the creative process as a means through which to break free of constraining categories, such as class and gender. Other poetry collections by Brand have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand served as Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012 and was named to the Order of Canada in 2017.

Autumn Knight

Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, working in performance, installation, video, and text. Drawing from her training in theatre and group psychology, she create performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority. Her work examines the way that institutional spaces regulate African American subjects or assert their absence. Her performance work has been presented at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Krannart Art Museum, The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, and Akademie der Kunste, Berlin.

Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto. Her research focuses on black visual culture, black diaspora studies, and feminist epistemologies with a particular emphasis on black female subjectivity and black women artists. Her two books In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) were both published by Duke University Press. She is currently completing the critical introduction to Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010) to be published by Duke University Press while working on a monograph titled Black. Still. Life.

Zachary Fabri

Dark Adaptive

Zachary Fabri is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses photography, video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Responsive to its particular context, his art explores the relationship between personal and political space, carving openings for dialogue regarding socio-political systems of oppression and categorization that enmesh individuals. Focusing on the political as much as the psychological, Fabri also investigates the performance of black identity and the vulnerability of black bodies across different sites. Fabri’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway; Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavík; Studio Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Solo exhibitions include Art in General, Brooklyn; The Bindery Projects, Saint Paul, Minnesota; and NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.

Andres Hernandez

Dark Adaptive

Andres Hernandez is a Chicago-based artist, designer, and educator who re-imagines the environments we inhabit and explores the potential of public spaces as sites of dialogue and social action. His recent projects include a 2018-19 visiting artist residency for the University of Arizona School of Art’s VASE Program and Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See A Line), a commissioned installation in collaboration with artists Amanda Williams and Shani Crowe for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hernandez is the co-founder of the Revival Arts Collective, founder and director of the Urban Vacancy Research Initiative, and a member of the exhibition design team for the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Art Education and Director of the Master of Arts in Art Education program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.