New York City (16 Sep 2021) Read the full article ‘Peace, solitude and belonging’: Black lives in the American south – in pictures
Tyler Mitchell’s Dreaming in Real Time is on at the Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, New York, until 30 October. (All photographs: Tyler Mitchell/Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York). In addition to Dreaming in Real Time, unseen works from Mitchell’s debut book I Can Make You Feel Good, can be viewed at the gallery’s 24th Street location until 30 October.
Dreaming in Real Time is an entirely new body of work by Tyler Mitchell that visualises scenes of peace, solitude and belonging for Black people in the pastoral American South. Centring on Mitchell’s ideas of home and community, the series includes large-scale tableaux of family and friends having fun. This new body of work will be a ‘homecoming’ of sorts shot in Atlanta, where Mitchell grew up.
The large format print, Time for a New Sky, shows a young man on a rooftop gently lifting a large fabric upward, blanketing the sky. For Mitchell, the image is a representation of self-possession and Mitchell’s belief in radical optimism: the figure has the sky in his hands, he can shape new horizons
Tyler created new images of subjects in the Atlanta metro area that consider historic and contemporary notions of refuge, repose and rootedness.
Concurrently on view is Mitchell’s exhibition of new work at the Gordon Parks Foundation. An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me draws on the rich interior material details found in vernacular Black family photographs, Mitchell created the new series of images and a site-specific installation that uses carpet, upholstery, antique frames and porcelain plates to imagine a modern family portrait of the African diaspora. This third exhibition is at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery, from 25 September until 2 January
Mitchell’s “Time for a New Sky” & Sting’s “Brand New Day” | Thematic Art | Inter\Sections
Sting My Songs Tour – Casears’s Palace, Las Vegas October 29 – November 13, 2021 | Sting My Songs Tour – Global 2021 – 2022
Delivered with a typically soulful Sting vocal, “Brand New Day” is an upbeat, hymn-like song that was released in September 1999, just months before the dawn of the 21st century. While it was actually written well in advance of that date, the song’s lyrics challenged the existential fears surrounding Y2K, offering a counterpoint to views that the apocalypse was just around the corner.
