We had the good fortune of connecting with Dance Doyle and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dance, what do you want people to remember about you?
You know, I wasn’t able to have children. When I found out, I hadn’t begun to see how it was a big blessing in disguise in my life.

Today, I deliver shaped, handwoven, tapestries that tell stories of living in overpopulated urban environments.
I create work with often life-size figures in the middle of a narrative. Every piece has a different personality and soul.
My legacy can also be some of the topics I’ve tackled with my work over the years such as homelessness, mental health, addiction, feminism, and class structures. These were all in attempts to humanize and take away the stigma around helping and understanding the folks going through these things.
My work is my legacy.
I hope that after I’m gone, people will still be able to access, have dialogue around, and enjoy my work for years to come.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.

I was self-taught and never threw limits at myself with weaving anything. There are some rules, yes but everything else is whimsical expressions in real time as I was creating my work. I’ve never used a cartoon to aid my work because I never had a teacher there to tell me to use one. So, then and today, I drew a simple 6” high sketch of the general design pinned it to the castle of my loom, and went from there. Because it’s just a simple design without detail, so much of my work is free-form and at the moment, without prior design. When I eye it, the work often looks like my drawings and I like that.
I’m excited that my work will only get more shaped, and I’ll be focusing now on other topics out there in this world to tackle.
Also, I just began my Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and this month I’ll be finishing my artist-in-residence at the Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, CA.
Those two things I’m incredibly proud of.
There were challenges that came up, but you just dealt with them one by one and kept going. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect and that sounds great to me.
I think my worst opponent had to have been myself. I will sometimes get in my own way. Less now than ten years ago but it’s always great to be vigilant and mindful of that.
What keeps me most focused is that I absolutely love doing the work.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I would take them to Tilden Park. We would go hiking, eat lunch on the upper deck of Dona on Piedmont Ave, then catch a movie at the Grand Lake Theater, Later in the afternoon evening, I would take them to eat and then see a show at La Peña Cultural Center. The next day I’d drive them up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco to see the sunrise then later that day we would visit local galleries in the Oakland Arts District.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
@fordhamgregory

Designer, Builder, Artist, Intellectual, Muse, Mentor

Website: Http://www.dancedoyle.com

Instagram: @dance_doyle

Image Credits
@dennistylerphotography

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