DOHA.- GRAY will participate in the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar with a monumental sculpture by Torkwase Dyson. Titled Nia, the sculpture is made of two identical components in steel and wood, which have been painted and hand-coated with graphite. Balancing curved forms and arcing cantilevers with sharply defined vertical passages, the sculpture forms a charged, architectural environment.

The second work in Dyson’s Memory Horizon series, Nia (the Swahili word for “purpose”), is described by the artist as “a deep meditation on the stillness of thresholds—the liminal space between the architecture of dispossession and the creative act of place-making for liberation.”

Throughout her work, Dyson confronts histories of enslavement and the geography, geometry, and architecture of dispossession. Dyson deploys shapes from stories of liberation and her own vocabulary of what she terms Black Compositional Thought to imagine strategies for spatial liberation. In Nia, the tension between curvilinear and rectilinear forms invites viewers to negotiate a newly defined space and to physically move in unfamiliar ways, and as such, confront historical registers and new possibilities.

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973 Chicago, IL; lives and works in Beacon, NY) combines expressive mark-making and geometric abstractions to explore continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Working in painting, drawing, sculpture and sound, Dyson interrogates the built environment, exploring how individuals, particularly black and brown people, negotiate, negate, and transfer systems of spatial order. Throughout her work and research, Dyson confronts issues of environmental liberation and envisions a path toward a more equitable future.

Dyson studied sociology and social work at Tougaloo College, Mississippi, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Yale School of Art. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at ‘T’ Space Rhinebeck, New York; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Missouri; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Pennsylvania; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Vermont; Hall Art Foundation, Vermont; and Serpentine Galleries, London. Group exhibitions and biennials include the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo; Desert X, California; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington DC; the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, among others.

Torkwase Dyson created the conceptual design, realized by The Met’s Design Department and SAT3 Studio, for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2025). Her monumental, immersive soundscape sculpture Akua is on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, through March 8, 2026. She is one of the commissioned artists for the 2026 59th Carnegie International, the longest-running exhibition of international art in North America. In Fall 2026 she will have a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria.