Open now, Fort Gansevoort is presenting FEAR, its third solo exhibition with Dawn Williams Boyd, the Atlanta-based artist widely celebrated for textile works that construct powerful, sociopolitical narratives. Boyd’s “cloth paintings” layer and stitch history and contemporary political references into striking tableaux that openly question America’s social structure and its citizens’ received knowledge. Populated by life- sized figures, her works teem with elaborate textures, ornate patterns, and virtuoso technique that match the complexity of her subject matter.
With FEAR, Boyd will debut a new series based on canonical American ephemera—photographs, etchings, advertisements, and the like—depicting racist imagery and historical accounts of subjugation. But in her appropriation, Boyd flips the script: white aggressors and Black victims trade roles, yielding an uncanny cognitive dissonance that draws the viewer toward a confrontation with ingrained ideas about race, power, and violence. Her reimaginings probe the relativity and instability of historical “truth,” raising urgent questions about how narratives are constructed, rewritten, and weaponized. At a moment when censorship and regressive government initiatives threaten to silence public discourse and erase truths from historical record, Boyd’s cloth paintings open a space for honest conversation.
Boyd is deeply attentive to the provenance of her working materials: they often underscore the context of her subject matter. She frequently uses salvaged clothing and fabric. In the FEAR series, she also incorporates textiles imported from Africa, sourced from a Black, female-owned specialty fabric store in the United States. Her preference for 100% cotton holds symbolic meaning, recalling the fraught history of cotton as a central export of the Confederacy, cultivated through the exploitative labor of enslaved Black people.
Boyd interrogates the legacy of racist imagery that has long permeated American culture, transforming images of oppression into powerful counternarratives. Such work resonates within a broader project of contemporary Black artists—among them, Betye Saar, Michael Ray Charles, and Kara Walker—who deploy and tinker with the dominant language of American visual culture to investigate racial stereotypes, collective memory, and structures of systemic racism. The alternate histories in Boyd’s cloth paintings issue a call for critical reflection and implore us to engage in difficult conversations about race rather than succumb to ennui and fear.
