Tyler Mitchell “I Can Make You Feel Good”

Jack Shainman Gallery (524 W 24th St)

This event has ended.

Jack Shainman Gallery presents two exhibitions by Tyler Mitchell at our Chelsea locations. These are Mitchell’s first solo exhibitions with the gallery and continue his legacy of making images that explore the histories of intimacy and meanings of home within Black communities.

I Can Make You Feel Good, at our 24th Street gallery, is an expansion of the body of work shown in Mitchell’s solo exhibition of the same name at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2019) and the International Center of Photography, New York (2020). The works included in this latest iteration, exhibited publicly for the first time, continue Mitchell’s Edenic exploration of situating a Black utopia in the everyday. 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.

Concurrently on view is Mitchell’s exhibition of new work at the Gordon Parks Foundation, An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me. Inspired by Gordon Parks’s photographs of Black families, Mitchell’s images are a contemporary envisioning of the Black American family through Black domestic spaces in Brooklyn, where the artist lives. Drawing on the rich interior material details found in vernacular Black family photographs, Mitchell created a 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.

Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995 Atlanta, GA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL, as well as the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. He has also been included in group exhibitions at the Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn, NY. He has lectured on the politics of image-making at several institutions including Harvard University, Paris Photo, and the International Center of Photography (ICP). Mitchell was awarded the 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, culminating in the exhibition mentioned above.