Tyler Mitchell

The simple joy of raising your hands to the sun, of draping an arm over a lover on a park bench, of pushing off on a swing so hard that for a brief second you’re nearly upside down: held dually at Jack Shainman’s 20th and 24th street locations, Tyler Mitchell’s solo show probes, dreams, and synthesizes a vision of what home and peace might look like for Black people in America.

One exhibition, “Dreaming in Real Time,” projects a paradiscal vision of the American South. Set in a variety of regions and geographies, including Mitchell’s native Georgia, there are archetypal images of an Edenic United States: well-manicured lawns, rippling sand dunes, grassy plains, and blue skies. But there are also more intimate images of love, such as Connective Tissue (2021), which traces a silken thread of saliva stretching from a child’s mouth to their parent’s prone chest. Heaven, Mitchell suggests, isn’t just lounging on red picnic blankets—it’s also, as in Chalk (2021), sitting on a cheap folding chair in a parking lot beside a cooler with your friends.

The artist toggles expertly between paean and critique. Like all utopias, Mitchell’s belies a hidden cruelty. In Redlining (Diptych), the plaid red lines of a gingham picnic blanket reference the cruel practice of planning urban environments based on race—each as American as apple pie. This specter of redlining also haunts Mitchell’s Tangled (2021), in which a pair of toddlers are caught in the string of a sweetly oversized red balloon.

In his second exhibition, “I Can Make You Feel Good,” Mitchell’s images often merge with the contrived nostalgia of a Ralph Lauren ad—wheatfields, an aurora of sunlight haloing a body sliding through the water. And why not? Is dream-making the sole terrain of white America? The couple in All American Family Portrait (2018) oozes fashionableness and sex, cradling and kissing their babies as a ragged US flag whips behind them; while in Time for a New Sky (2020), a sharply dressed figure holds the corner of a sky-colored tarp, as if unfurling a new image of beauty. The best works in these exhibitions sit solidly within this intersection, where Mitchell creates new images and associations of the American pastoral. —Lisa Yin Zhang