DAWN WILLIAMS BOYD
CLOTH PAINTINGS: The FEAR Series
Since 2022, I've been working on a new series based on canonical American ephemera—photographs, etchings, advertisements, movies and postcards which depict racist imagery and document historical accounts of race-motivated domestic terrorism. In FEAR, I've flipped the script - I’ve taken this visual propaganda, this generational indoctrination and changed the racial identifiers of the protagonists and their victims - 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. These images 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, these cloth paintings open a space for honest conversation. FEAR is an alternate look at the racial history of the US in an attempt to understand how racism/white supremacy brought us to where we are today and provide an opportunity to discuss where we must go from here.
FEAR, the exhibition debuted at Fort Gansevoort, New York, November 19, 2025, and will be on display thru January 24, 2026. Because of the unusual (for me) color combinations used in this series, the gallery walls were painted a dark moody blue/black. I've continued that color theme on this page to give you a feel for the dramatic presentation at the gallery.
The images are accompanied by the same Object Labels you would find when you visited Fort Gansevoort in person. Thanks to Maggie Dougherty, Gallery Director, for her help with the verbiage. Thanks to Ron Witherspoon for the photos of my work.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Abduction, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
45 x 67.5 inches
In this unsettling scene, Boyd inverts history by staging a fictionalized transatlantic slave trade in which Africans are the slave traders and the white figures are the enslaved. The looming edifice in the background closely resembles Elmina Castle in Ghana, which was built by the Portuguese in 1482 and later became a hub of the slave trade. Its presence signals the role of architecture in asserting colonial power. The colorful and richly patterned textiles in which the two central Black figures are dressed underscore their authority, while the nakedness of the white captives highlights their vulnerability and dispossession. Though Boyd often prefers to work with predominantly 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—further deepening the dialogue between material, identity, and power. Prominently held by one of the Black conquerors, the gleaming block of gold equates the white human bodies with commodities—a stark reminder of the economies built on extraction and exploitation. The eyes peering from below the floorboards of the main deck suggest an intense darkness, both of the conditions to which slaves were subjected in the lower decks of slave ships and of the psychic terror of abduction. Through these layered details, Boyd prompts viewers to reflect on history, and how the world might look had the roles been reversed
Dawn Williams Boyd
Indoctrination, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
67 x 59 inches
This cloth painting draws inspiration from an etching illustrating Mary A. Livermore’s memoir, The Story of My Life: The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years, published in 1897. A leader in the American social reform movement, Livermore recounted her time as a tutor on a Virginia plantation where she witnessed the brutal treatment of enslaved people. The referenced etching, The Brutal Whipping of Matt, depicts one such scene, described in her memoir with harrowing detail. By appropriating this image, Boyd channels the same emotional force of horror and empathy Livermore sought to capture. The artist’s addition of the overseer on horseback—who surveys while one white enslaved person is forced to whip another—underscores the calculated use of violence and psychological manipulation by slaveholders. Across this series, Boyd’s use of archival imagery and racial role reversal highlights the fragility of our relationship to the past in a time when history is being rewritten, manipulated, and weaponized. Her compositions remind us of the importance of discerning fact from fiction amid today’s era of misinformation, and point to the critical role of historical documentation, archives, and primary sources in corroborating historical “truth.”
The Lost Cause Mythos, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
56 x 70.5 inches
This composition takes inspiration from the classic 1939 film Gone with the Wind, itself based on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel. Here, Boyd flips the script of the Antebellum-era narrative by presenting her own version of Scarlett O'Hara as a Black queen attended by her white maid. By recasting Mammy as a white woman, Boyd exposes the history of this racist archetype in American visual culture. A collector of Black Americana memorabilia, Boyd is committed to reclaiming such artifacts, preserving them as evidence of the misinformation campaigns embedded in American media and advertising. In her composition, the white mammy’s despondent gaze destabilizes the “happy slave” myth and the romanticized vision of the Antebellum South. Instead, the Black protagonist stands confidently in her chamber, surrounded by lush red tapestries—red being a recurring symbol of power throughout the series. The carved bed posts reference commemorative bronzes from the historical West African Kingdom of Benin, which depict the Queen Mother figure. This specific detail points to the historic precedent of Black women’s political influence, while acknowledging how Black women were simultaneously forced to uphold white society in America. Rather than dressing the young woman in a confining corset and cumbersome dress, the maid presents her with a bowl of indulgent bright red strawberries. Boyd’s counter narrative presents a liberated Black woman unrestricted by circumstances and free to choose her own path.
Dawn Williams Boyd
The Father of Gynecology, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
36 x 66 inches
Boyd’s inspiration for this work is the infamous James Marion Sims, often called “the father of gynecology.” Sims is a deeply controversial figure due to the brutal, nonconsensual surgical experiments he conducted on enslaved Black women in the mid-1800s. Although credited with inventing the speculum, similar instruments existed in the ancient world. In this cloth painting, Boyd reflects on Sims’ legacy–built on exploitation rather than innovation–and the lack of agency of his enslaved patients. In this unflinching scene, a terrified woman lies exposed as a male doctor examines her with the surgical tools seen nearby. By reversing the races of doctor and patient, the artist compels viewers to confront historical violence and empathize with the subject’s fear and vulnerability. Women’s reproductive health—a recurring theme in Boyd’s practice—also appears in earlier works addressing abortion rights and the alarming maternal mortality rates among Black women in the United States. By revisiting unethical medical practices of the past, Boyd calls attention to ongoing inequities in American women’s healthcare today.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Brainwashed, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
66 x 43.5 inches
This work reinterprets an early 20th-century advertisement for Fairy Soap bearing the slogan, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy Soap?” In the source image, a timid Black child clutches her dress with shame while an equally unkempt white girl holds the soap with a playful, doll-like demeanor. The ad’s casual suggestion of literal “whitewashing” exemplifies the latent racism woven into American consumer culture. In Boyd’s version, she inverts the roles. The Black child now assertively extends a bar of African black soap inscribed with “Fairy” to the white child. In the background, a vignette of white field workers picking cotton underscores the enduring consequences of such racialized aggression. The clever pun in the artwork’s title, Brainwashed, acknowledges the original ad’s subject matter of washing (with its implication that Blackness is equated to filth and should be washed off) while highlighting the power of advertisements to manipulate public opinion.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Terrorism, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
57.5 x 68.75 inches
Boyd’s primary visual references for this gruesome composition comes from a photograph taken by George H. Farnum documenting the horrific lynching of Laura Nelson on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. This image was later distributed as postcards—a common practice of the era that turned racial terror into grotesque memorabilia. Farnum’s photographs remain some of the only known images of a Black female lynching victim in existence. The Associated Press later reported that Laura was raped before she and her son were hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. Following the incident, District Judge John Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching. In his statement to the jury, the judge condemned the lynching but did so from a racist and paternalistic viewpoint, using a hypocritical defense of justice that upholds white supremacy. In his address, he asserted his belief that white people, as the “superior race,” must protect Black people as the “weaker race” of “less intelligence.” Having made a painting about this subject years ago, Boyd, in her latest series, returns to this subject to examine lynching as an act of terrorism with the explicit intention of invoking fear. Referencing the image of a Klansman for the figure on horseback, here the artist transforms this subject into the literal image of the Devil. Boyd’s graphic and upsetting imagery is intended to immediately grasp the viewer’s attention and elicit a strong, visceral reaction. Her hope is that the cognitive dissonance of the racial role reversal in the depicted scene sparks empathy and critical reflection from all viewers.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Cultural Appropriation, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
47 x 58 inches
In this cloth painting, Boyd reimagines historical photographs of the famed Cotton Club. Here, white performers in banana skirts evoke the famous costume worn by Josephine Baker, while the well-dressed Black patrons wear African print clothing and jewelry featuring cowry shells. Their elaborate adornment asserts cultural dominance over the bare-breasted performers on stage. By swapping the races of her subjects in this Jazz Age milieu, Boyd highlights the exploitative dynamic—past and present—of the veneration and consumption of Black culture alongside the simultaneous disregard for Black life. The dynamic tableau of figures in the foreground is reminiscent of compositions in the artist’s earlier Ladies Night series which honors the joy, camaraderie, and rituals that women share when gathering together for an evening out. Situating the scene in a glamorous, convivial atmosphere, Boyd emphasizes the dichotomy between the spectators’ leisurely consumption and the labor of the entertainers.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Desegregation Should have Been Enough, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
59 x 116.5 inches
Many of the artist’s source images for this work come from photographs published in Life magazine documenting the Black students, known as the “Little Rock Nine.” This group of brave students walked into Central High School supervised by the National Guard in 1957 as schools were contentiously being integrated in the United States. This choice of reference material points to the artist’s interest in the role of photojournalism in shaping the narrative around current events and influencing public perception. Employing her strategy of role reversal, Boyd highlights the impassioned indignation of the women screaming at the students. While studying her source imagery, the artist was interested in the dynamic of the female subjects who were so overcome with hate that they allowed themselves to be photographed in a state of impropriety. The prominent placement of the guard in the foreground emphasizes his authoritative presence over the depicted scene. By monumentalizing this contemplative portrait, Boyd invites exploration of the physiological state of her subject whose job is to administer the change of school integration and protect the new students. Though the scene Boyd presents is complicated with her racial inversion of the historical event, the ethical quandary of her protagonist resonates in the present–what does it mean to commit to protecting the rights of all regardless of one’s personal or socialized prejudices?
Dawn Williams Boyd
The Illusion of Freedom, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
47 x 60 inches
Though not based on a specific historical source image, this work alludes to the court-ordered desegregation of public swimming pools following the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In response to the law, many cities chose to close their public pools or establish private, membership-only clubs—a legacy that continues to shape patterns of urban recreation and access today. This retreat from shared public space deepened existing racial and class divides. Boyd’s title points to this tension, acknowledging a surface-level compliance with the law while undermining its spirit of inclusion. The altered spelling in the sign reading “No Ytz Allowed” signals that the scene takes place in an alternate reality. Unlike other works in the series that closely echo historical imagery, here Boyd adopts a more contemporary style, situating the composition in an ambiguous time: perhaps the present, or even the near future. The racial and economic divide is rendered literally through the fence separating the “haves” from the “have-nots.” Yet the chain-link’s transparency and openness suggest the fragility—and ultimate fiction—of such constructed barriers.
Dawn Williams Boyd
They Marched, They Rode Buses, They Sat In, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
73.5 x 106 inches
The large scale and intricate details of this ambitious scene create a dramatic crescendo within Boyd’s series. The composition draws on documentary photography of the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, initiated by four young, Black college students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro. This nonviolent protest broke racial barriers and sparked a nationwide movement against segregation. In this composition, Boyd highlights the verbal and physical abuse the protesters endured, emphasizing their remarkable restraint and discipline. The violence unfolding in the background contrasts starkly with the stoicism of the demonstrators, who were trained not to react to provocation. While the gingham pattern and lunch counter signage evoke the 1960s, the depiction of brutality outside the café connects the scene to the present day. By inverting the expected roles—depicting Black-on-white violence—Boyd underscores the saturation of contemporary media with images of violence against Black individuals, making this reversal both unsettling and thought-provoking. Having lived through the civil rights movement herself, Boyd draws direct parallels between past and present, highlighting how, despite decades of protest and progress, the “United” States remain profoundly divided.
For more information please contact Fort Gansevoort, New York : gallery@fortgansevoort (917-639-3113)