Summer Series:
Tyler Mitchell

Jul 22, 2021 12:30PM

Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995 Atlanta, GA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY ) is a photographer and filmmaker working across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. In 2018, he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue for Beyoncé’s appearance in the September issue. The following year, a portrait from this series was acquired by The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection. In 2019 Mitchell held his first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good, at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam where he showed new photographic and video works including his film Idyllic Space. An iteration of the show traveled to the International Center of Photography in New York in 2020. Mitchell published an eponymous monograph with Prestel Random House in conjunction with the exhibition, further exploring his take on a Black visual utopia. In 2020 Mitchell was announced as the recipient of the Gordon Parks Fellowship, which will support a new project that reflects and draws inspiration from Parks’ central themes of representation and social justice. Mitchell’s fellowship will culminate in an exhibition of the new works at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery in Pleasantville, NY. Mitchell has lectured at a number of institutions on the politics of image making including

Summer Series programs are free and open to the public, however space is limited and registration is required.

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In Conversation With

Helen Molesworth

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023, Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist, a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, Dance/Draw, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Raoul De Keyser, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022, she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize. Photo by Catherine Opie.

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