For the Scripps 79th Ceramic Annual curated by Jasmine Baetz, Dykstra created a site-specific painting with the help of Leslie Ahuatzi, Jayati Anshu, Leslie M. Hernandez-Armenta, Lillie Minskoff, Alexandria Nyx, Elle Roc, José Sanchez, and Giovanni Tovar. By inviting racialized individuals and members of marginalized communities to join in executing this work, Dykstra draws upon Muñoz’s writing in The Sense of Brown. “The brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular subjectivity and the individualized subjectivities. …Brownness is a being with, being alongside” (Muñoz, 2). The painting will root itself in a corner of the gallery and extend outward along both walls, refusing to remain in the margins of the gallery. By repeatedly recording our presence on the gallery walls, this site-specific painting becomes an act of shared presence and persistent resistance – stating over and over again, I am here; we are still here.
Using clay and oxides mixed with acrylic medium, this site-specific painting stretches the limits of traditional ceramics. In one way this site-specific painting is ephemeral. It was painted over at the end of the exhibition period; however, the trace of our collective labor remains embedded in the material history of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.