Dawn Williams Boyd “FEAR” at Fort Gansevoort

Dawn Williams Boyd Rewrites the Archive with Needle and Thread

Fort Gansevoort returns with a haunting and necessary solo exhibition by Dawn Williams Boyd, the Atlanta-based textile artist who has reshaped how cloth can tell history. FEAR, opening November 19, 2025, marks Boyd’s third exhibition with the gallery and showcases a new series of large-scale “cloth paintings” that engage with the social trauma and cultural mythology of American life—particularly as it relates to race, power, and historical manipulation.

Born in 1952 in Neptune, New Jersey, and now based in Atlanta, Dawn Williams Boyd has long worked in fabric, her primary medium for reclaiming lost narratives. Her self-described “cloth paintings” are not simply quilts—they’re immersive compositions steeped in political commentary, drawing on archival materials, religious symbolism, and iconography from both pop culture and African American history. These visual tapestries are populated by life-sized figures rendered in ornate patterning, stitched detail, and layered textures—hallmarks of Boyd’s precise and masterful technique.

In FEAR, Boyd’s gaze sharpens further, turning to American ephemera—photographs, advertising, propaganda—to flip racial roles and reframe the conversation. Black victims become white; white aggressors become Black. The result is a body of work that interrogates the accepted canon and reclaims the dignity and strength of the Black figure with searing clarity. These reversals disrupt visual norms and force viewers to confront the deep bias embedded in our collective visual memory.

Dawn Williams Boyd Threads Resistance into Material Memory

In Cultural Appropriation (2025), Dawn Williams Boyd reimagines Harlem’s Cotton Club, a Jazz Age venue that notoriously hosted Black performers for white-only audiences. In Boyd’s version, the roles are reversed: white dancers don banana skirts in a satirical nod to Josephine Baker, while Black patrons, adorned in African textiles and cowry shells, assert their dominance with quiet elegance. The dynamic is more than aesthetic—it’s a layered critique of the commodification of Black culture without reverence for Black lives.

Boyd’s sourcing of material is intentional. Her works often incorporate repurposed clothing and fabrics that underscore the themes she’s addressing. For FEAR, she introduces textiles imported from Africa, purchased from a Black, female-owned specialty fabric shop in the U.S. Her commitment to 100% cotton is as symbolic as it is tactile, evoking America’s fraught history of slavery and exploitation tied to the cotton trade.

In The Lost Cause Mythos (2025), Boyd dismantles the mythology surrounding Gone with the Wind, presenting a Black Scarlett O’Hara flanked by a pale-skinned Mammy figure. Draped in red—the color of revolution, danger, and vitality—this queenly figure is surrounded by African-inspired tapestries and Benin bronze motifs. The work fuses Black womanhood with royal iconography and turns Hollywood’s most enduring Southern fantasy into a tableau of resistance and reclamation.

While the cloth may be soft, Dawn Williams Boyd’s message is anything but. In a time when censorship and revisionist history continue to threaten public discourse, FEAR operates as both shield and sword. Boyd’s work is uniquely textural—her fabrics carry stories embedded not just in image but in stitch, fiber, and thread. These are works that ask us to touch, to feel, to reckon.