Torkwase Dyson, Tomorrow Was Yesterday

Torkwase Dyson’s animation project Tomorrow Was Yesterday (2026), commissioned for this exhibition, begins with her recognition that all of us are indelibly tied to the infrastructure of extraction economies. Informed by years of research into the oil and gas drilling off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, Dyson’s multi-scalar project extends her examination of environmental conditions and histories and present strategies of Black liberation.

While the animation, presented at Kamin Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium, immerses viewers in an underwater environment where the machinery of the resource industry has taken hold, the installation at Carnegie Museum of Art—comprised of drawings, paintings, sculptural objects, and a video—evokes the artist’s studio as a site of inquiry and envisioning. “When I’m making work to comprehend . . . any extraction geography,” Dyson states, “drawing and sound take me to a transhistorical mindset… I start responding as a maker to my sensoria, [and] I can be present in the metamorphosis and [in] a radical indeterminacy.”

Tomorrow Was Yesterday plays at Kamin Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium every Wednesday and select Sundays throughout the run of the exhibition.

This video was produced by Hudson Lane.