Exhibition Information:
August 21, 2023 - December 31, 2023

Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art
Savannah, GA

Organized with

Thumbnail image: Installation view of “Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries,” SCAD Museum of Art. Courtesy of SCAD.

Installation view of “Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries,” SCAD Museum of Art. Courtesy of SCAD.

In his most ambitious exhibition to date, Tyler Mitchell displays photographs innovatively printed on textiles in an immersive, laundry line installation alongside new “altar” sculptures. Strung from a zig-zagging clothesline, Threads of Memory is Mitchell’s latest iteration of the iconic form, stretching nearly 300 feet along the unique gallery space and framing its historic 1850s Savannah Gray brick archways. The hanging textile prints depict pastoral scenes and Black bodies, drawing inspiration from Gordon Parks’ photography and the landscape of the southeastern U.S., where Mitchell was born and raised. Complementing this dramatic, enveloping experience, Mitchell’s sculptures reference historic domestic objects with subtle alterations and embedded photographs, evoking memory and belonging in ways that are deeply personal. The exhibition’s poetic nature articulates a sensitivity and attentiveness to the quieter moments of life and the potential for beauty and transformation in things that may otherwise seem ordinary. Combining installation, sculpture, and photography, the artist invites us to consider our own relationship to the image, our environments, and each other.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, Atlanta; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) 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’s 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.