Biography
Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based artist. Born and bred there during the ’80s and ’90s. Dance’s background was filled with years of ceramic sculpture and hand-building. When Dance was attending San Francisco State University in 2005, they took a textiles class and learned how to dress a loom. After college, Dance became self-taught at woven tapestry and envisioned it as a better way to journal in a painterly way with hand-dyed natural fibers. Dance’s tapestries look similar to their drawings, pulling all designs from their crowded head. Dance has never used a cartoon to aid their process because they were never taught to use one. They draw a tiny picture, pin it to the castle of their loom, and figure the rest out.
Through years of self-taught trials, errors, and taking risks, Dance grew as a contemporary artist and figured out techniques through muscle memory. The primary focus for them has been telling narratives, based not only on their own stories but ones said to them, that reflect, piece by piece, examples of our current human condition in different overpopulated urban environments.
From 2018 to 2020, Dance finished three artist-in-resident programs at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. Dance has served as vice-president of Tapestry Weavers West, and is a member of the American Tapestry Alliance, and the Textile Arts Council at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. Their work has been shown at the Legion of Honor Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.
Dance has been published in Fibre Forum Magazine, Untitled Magazine's Innovate issue and was a Chenven Foundation Grant recipient. Then in 2022, Dance was nominated for the Outstanding Student Award, granted by the Surface Design Association, and was awarded the 2022 All-College Honors Scholarship from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. In addition, Dance was awarded both the Jack K. & Gertrude Murphy and an Edwin Anthony & Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan Award in 2022 and the Barclay Simpson Award in 2023.
During the summer of 2023, they were both an Open Studio Resident at Haystack in Maine and were a Meantime AIR at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, CA.
Dance is a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. The opening reception for our final exhibition is on July 12th, 2024 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, CA.