Atlanta artist Dawn William Boyd next to one of her cloth paintings.
Courtesy of: Dawn Williams Boyd
Atlanta artistDawn Williams Boyd was thrilled to discover that the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET) in New York — home to works by Degas, Van Gogh, and countless other luminaries — hadacquired one of her pieces for its permanent collection. Boyd makes what she calls ‘cloth paintings,’ fabric scrap compositions intricately embellished and conveying stories rife with meaning. The MET recently bought her piece “Sankofa.” Boyd’s art is also the subject of a current exhibition, “Woe,” at the University of Georgia’s Lupin Foundation Gallery. The artist joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about her process and the histories that often inspire her stirring and complexly textured artwork.
Interview highlights:
On“Sankofa“and working in the unconventional medium of fabric:
“It is an image of an African-American woman who is treading water, in the remembrances of her past, and trying to keep her head above water, and holding the images of other pieces of her artwork above water, also,” said Boyd. “’Sankofa’ means to look back at your past in order to engage your future … It’s a semi-autographical piece, so it has images of my mother, my children, my eighth-grade report card, and other little pieces floating in the water, and then she’s holding images of other pieces of work that I’ve done above her head.”
“One of the reasons that I call them ‘cloth paintings’ is that I approach them the same way that I approached acrylic paintings when I was working in that medium,” said Boyd. “So of course, you start with an idea, you work it into a small sketch, and because these pieces are quite large, I have to blow them up to the sketch of whatever the finished size is going to be. It is drawn again on tracing paper, and then drawn again onto the fabric. From there it’s more of a collage-type application … And then it’s drawn one more time with sewing machine, and finally details are drawn with needle and embroidering floss for details like the eyes and the lips.”
Dawn Williams Boyd’s piece “Sankofa” was acquired by The MET for their permanent collection. (Courtesy of: Dawn Williams Boyd)
Revealing hidden histories through art:
“The African-Americans were only able to make art, to communication through art, with scraps when we were here in the United States,” said Boyd. “We had to make do with what was available. So there were scraps of fabric available. There was leftover cotton that had not been harvested in the fields which was gathered and used to stuff the quilts that were made. So it was a survival situation where … you were unable to go to Joann’s and buy all the fabric that you wanted.”
“While you’re making something that you need, something that is going to keep you warm, you had might as well use it to communicate … I like to use this when I’m doing projects with children that talk about the Underground Railroad,” said Boyd. “Many times quilts were used as a signal to, ‘stay where you are,’ ‘wait ’til sundown,’ ‘come now,’ ‘come back tomorrow.’ So they have many, many uses that are not just objects for practical use, they are also objects like mine that you hang on the wall, to tell you something that you don’t already know, to communicate information that you need to survive.”
“They say that the story of the hunt would be different if it were told from the perspective of the prey,” said Boyd. “So what I’m trying to do is to give the perspective of American history through those persons that are least able to change history, those persons that are affected most by history.”
“A lot of the pieces are very political. A lot of them talk about unhappy incidences in the history of this country, both in the past and in the present, for that matter,” said Boyd. “But on the other side, some of them are the most beautiful pieces that I’ve done, that have absolutely nothing to do with American history.”
“I think that however hopeful our future is, our past — and I’m talking about America’s past, not just African-Americans, but America’s past — has had so many sad, woeful experiences, that people of various sorts from this country have experienced, that it clicked … with me. It was short and evocative, and so we said, ‘Well, let’s just call it that.’”
Boyd’s cloth painting collection “Woe” will be on display at the Lupin Foundation Gallery at the University of Georgia in Athens from August 27 through November 18.
