You can use words and images to tell a story, but you can also use scraps of textiles and fabrics like Dawn Williams Boyd does.
The artist usually employs donated or second-hand textiles (carefully removed from a variety of clothes including vintage prom dresses or wedding gowns to add more levels to her work, while she buys a variety of fabrics to create different skin tones) and quilting, embroidery and beading techniques to stitch representations of modern America as experienced by minority groups.
Born in 1952 in Neptune, New Jersey, Dawn Williams Boyd grew up surrounded by fabrics, needles and threads, as her grandmother and mother usually made everything they may have needed, from curtains to school clothes.
Boyd got her BFA at Stephens College, Columbia, in 1974, and first started painting on canvas, but she didn't feel satisfied with the technique. She eventually found her true vocation when she returned to the lessons learnt from the women in her family and started creating "cloth paintings," balanced combinations of quilting, embroidery and beading to stitch representations of modern American histories.
All the themes Boyd tackles are intense - xenophobia and immigration, racial violence and systemic racism, female sexuality, misogyny and abortion rights, physical and psychological abuses of power.
Her layered fabric forms often conjure up brutal scenes, shocking narratives and historical moments that provide us with a strong social commentary.
Fort Gansevoort (5 Ninth Avenue, New York) is dedicating Dawn Williams Boyd her first solo exhibition that will open later on this week.
"The Tip of the Iceberg" (September 21 through November 19, 2022) will feature twelve new large-scale works that move from political references and personal recollections. This presentation coincides with the last leg of the artist's traveling museum exhibition "Dawn Williams Boyd: Woe", on view at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
As the artist explains in a press release, the title of the exhibition was inspired by Boyd's observations of catastrophic headlines dominating the news in the last few years.
As Boyd states: "...others, more learned than I - scientists, historians, social commentators - were already discussing these matters and being mostly ignored. And yet, here we are, in 2022, on the very precipice of changes to the way we define ourselves - the tip of the iceberg that we know hides disaster if we don't make a course change immediately."
Boyd invites us to make that course change through striking compositions populated by life-sized figures rendered in vivid colours that are particularly poignant.
At times Boyd uses metaphors in her works: in "The Death of Democracy" (2022), Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un carry a casket, a representation of the fall of democracy, while on the left side of the scene, the artist represented the personification of evil, a character with fiery eyes and bloody claws.
In "Leaving Alabama" ( 2022), Boyd portrays a diverse group of women on a road trip, crossing the Alabama state line. but there is a deeper meaning behind this scene.
Check out the number on the license plate, 410US113, and you will realise that's the office citation of the historic 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court case. The idea for this piece came to Boyd in 2019 as Alabama's governor, Kay Ivey, signed a bill outlawing abortion at nearly any stage of pregnancy. As Roe vs. Wade was overturned in June this year, Boyd's work assumes new meanings about a woman's rights. Other works have a journalistic twist about them, "Fear For My Life" (2022) shows an aerial view of a young boy lying in a pool of his own blood, a toy water gun at his feet and police badges around his limp body. The torsion of the body calls to mind Pietà sculptures, hinting at sorrow and grief.
"The subject represents all the innocent mother's sons who have been murdered by those who are sworn to protect and serve," Boyd explains, while the title hints at the fear of Black children under attack in America, and the defense often used by law enforcement to justify irrational acts of violence against unarmed individuals. The technique in this piece is particularly striking as Boyd integrated in the work real police department patches sourced online and from a local Georgia antique market. The badges from across the U.S. point at the pervasiveness of police brutality that continues to perpetuate racism and ravage communities across America.
"The pen is mightier than the sword," says the old adage, but in Boyd’s case, it's the humble needle that does the trick, proving that artists can be at the forefront of political change and offer us informative and powerful works that can be used as social commentaries or to tell us stories about the past that can warn us about the future.
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