Artist Torkwase Dyson and scholar Daphne A. Brooks discuss Akua, the artist’s first public project in New York City, and the sound research that bridges their respective crafts. Together, they will discuss Dyson’s architectural pavilion, on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park, as a porous encounter between sound, place, and history. The speakers will connect Brooks’s academic chronicling of Black female musicians to the seismic sonic landscapes found in Dyson’s compositions for Akua. 

Registration is required here. Seating is first come, first served, so please arrive early. Your registration does not guarantee a seat. Doors will close at 6:45pm. 

Accessibility: Email Gabriela López Dena, Associate Curator of Public Practice, at glopez@publicartfund.org with questions and requests for accessibility. Please send any needs for services or accommodations to support your participation in this program, including ASL interpretations, hearing aids, and simultaneous translation, by October 21.

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. She frequently creates compositions of three “hypershapes”—a rectangular box, a triangle, and a trapezoid. Each form references a historical person who escaped confinement through a space of that shape: for example, Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years in a trapezoidal attic crawlspace. As representations of spaces used for escape, migration, and transformation, Dyson’s hypershapes embody a Black experience defined by constant shapeshifting and change. Previously she was the Spring 2019 Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art at The Cooper Union.

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR; Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of eleven book awards and prizes. Brooks has written liner notes for artists such as Prince and Nina Simone, and her 2010 notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell as well as 2011’s Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia have each won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. Her edited essay anthology Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign: Pop Culture and the Sonic (After)Lives of David Bowie and Prince is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2026.