When artist Torkwase Dyson was first invited to design the exhibition space for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming Costume Institute show, she had no prior history with the department. Born in Chicago and raised in the South, Dyson is principally a painter, sculptor, and theorist.
“I don’t have a big personal history with fashion,” she admits with a laugh during our conversation. “I learned a lot working on this exhibition.”
In fact, Dyson had never seen a Costume Institute exhibition before, so she took a guided tour of last spring’s “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” to get a sense of its scale and scope. Around the same time, Monica Miller, a co-curator of “Superfine,” sent Dyson a copy of her own book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, which serves as the scholarly and conceptual foundation for the new show. What followed, Dyson says, was an artistic awakening.
“It opened up a door for ambition that I had not recognized in the work until that moment,” Dyson tells me. “I don’t do design work—I’m a visual artist. But walking into ‘Sleeping Beauties’ was like entering another world. The intricacy of it was inspiring. It made me think about what embodied experience could look like within my own sculptural language.”
Though Dyson came to the project with no background in exhibition design, her work has long engaged notions of space, architecture, and Black liberation, appearing at institutions including the Whitney Museum and Pace Gallery. The “Superfine” commission offered her the chance to transform a 10,000-square-foot gallery into something dynamic, alive, and in direct conversation with centuries of Black self-fashioning.
Rather than designing around specific garments, Dyson began with a concept: “I wanted to take the idea of the frame, or framing Black life, and use it as a force multiplier,” she explains. From these frames she developed her architectural language, or what she calls “hyper shapes”: modular forms that could accommodate garments and objects of unknown scale, all while maintaining a sense of mobility, agility, and presence. “Some shapes think about volume, others about open air or enclosure,” she says. “It was important that each structure could serve the curators’ needs but also tell a story on its own.”
