For Tyler Mitchell, the Clothesline Becomes an Emblem of Luxury

The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia is housed in a historic building that once served as a depot for the Central of Georgia Railway, the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the United States. One very long gallery features a succession of archways along one side composed of Savannah Grey Brick, a unique over-sized brick dating to the 1800s that were hand-formed by enslaved people on a plantation called the Hermitage on the Savannah River. Along the other side of the gallery is a clean modern wall of windows.

It's against this backdrop that artist Tyler Mitchell’s exhibition, “Domestic Imaginaries” is staged. The exhibition features a showstopping 300-foot-long clothesline that starts at one end of the gallery and zig-zags clear through to the other end. From this meandering line, textiles of varying sizes and materials are hung with clothespins, each one featuring a photograph taken by Mitchell.

The photos in this work, called Threaded Memory, are mostly abstracted images of young Black people at rest or play, or sometimes doing quasi-domestic tasks like washing sheets, done nonetheless in a way that exudes a sense of presence and joyfulness. You might see a foot stepping on grass or a couple of people huddled intimately behind a sheet, or a swath of nothing but exquisitely blue sky. Leaving the blinds open, with the sunlight streaming through the windows, Mitchell has invited the outdoors in to mingle with his work, and allow the viewer to experience the elements as his subjects do, to allow the two spaces to converge.

Some of the textiles are light and transparent allowing the sunlight to permeate, while others are heavier and opaque. It’s difficult to get a grounding view of the whole space. The viewer has to begin a journey through the clothesline and have the show unfold as one navigates, sometimes tilting your head back to view smaller works hung very high.

While his own childhood—Mitchell was born and raised in Georgia, where he lived in the same home for 18 years—was one filled with leisure and green space, he sees what a luxury outdoor space and free time have historically been, especially for Black people.

“I really started to think about leisure time, the great fortune of leisure time I’ve had growing up in the South as a real luxury and as actually what I want to be talking about,” Tyler told Art & Object. “And the idea that free time, leisure moments of reprieve of rest, more inward meditation—I’m not talking about meditation as the institution or practice—whatever that means to the self. That those moments are the ultimate luxury.”

It was Mitchell’s cover shoot of Beyoncé for Vogue in 2018—the first cover of that magazine shot by a Black artist—that first put the artist and photographer on the map. Mitchell, who moved to New York to attend NYU, and is now based in Brooklyn, was also the youngest person to ever shoot the cover. Over the past few years, he’s been steadily making waves in the art world with shows at Aperture Gallery (2019), International Center of Photography (ICP) (2020) Jack Shainman Gallery (2021), Gagosian London (2022), and The Gordon Parks Foundation (2022).

“I have admired Tyler Mitchell’s work for a number of years after first being introduced to it by Antwaun Sargent, through his 2019 The New Black Vanguard exhibition,” SCAD Museum of Art Chief Curator Daniel S. Palmer (who organized the exhibition) told Art & Object. “When Tyler and I first had an opportunity to meet a few years ago, I was really impressed with his thoughtfulness and artistic ambition. He’s very quickly found a singular voice in the beautiful pastoral mode in which he works.”

The exhibition at SCAD MOA is something of a homecoming for Mitchell, as it is his first exhibition in his home state of Georgia. And this return got him thinking about his formative years and his upbringing.

“When I was growing up as a kid, [Georgia] had a deep conservatism,” he said. “That’s changed, which is interesting to me. As a kid that sort of gets imparted on you by way of a feeling of a need to conform. Sort of a pressure to assimilate in certain ways. Add that to teen angst, and it made me want to move to New York. It’s funny making work now that reflects on being here.”

This is not the first time that Mitchell has used clotheslines in his work. This element first made an appearance at the 2020 ICP exhibition, “I Can Make You Feel Good,” his first solo exhibition in the U.S., taking inspiration from artists such as Gordon Parks who used the laundry line as a poetic symbol in his work.

The show at SCAD MOA however offers the largest iteration to date, as well as Mitchell’s sculptural Altar works, three-dimensional works that are functional pieces of furniture—designed by Mitchell and commissioned by the Savannah College of Art and Design—that have photographic elements worked into them—a bookshelf with a vanity mirror overlaid with a photographic image, or an elegant sofa with photographs printed on the upholstery. The pieces feel enhanced with the personal touch of a cherished item and also speak to the ever-more evanescent idea of personal time and space. 

“We use furniture to make our own exhibits within the home, of precious memories,” Mitchell said noting how he was first moved by the sight of a friend's personal photo placed on a mirror. “I was interested in how those sites become potentially spiritual places and contain emotional power and memory.”

Predating the clothesline, the sheet as emblem has figured before in Mitchell’s work. That famed cover of Beyoncé, for example, depicted the pop star in a floral headdress seated in front of a white sheet. Asked about its meaning, Tyler said, “If we really take the idea of fabric and explode it out into all its many meanings, you can really look at it from a place of how humans assign cultural values to things. Some fabrics are more valuable than others. Some are less valuable or quotidian.”

While the images exude a sense of leisure and joy, there are underlying references that speak to the darker history of the South. During a talk with Daniel S. Palmer during the opening in September, Mitchell was asked if the sheets harkened back to the quilts hung on clotheslines that provided guidance to enslaved people traveling along the Underground Railroad, especially given the history of the SCAD MOA’s building as an antebellum railway depot. Mitchell responded, “It’s not by accident that this landscape has shaped my psychic memory." 

Though Mitchell admits to not having started out with an aspiration to become a visual artist, he references Robert Gober and Arthur Jafa among his influences. “I think certainly ten years ago, the art world felt very distant, rarified, highly educated, a lot of things I didn’t have exposure to. So for me, I come at this as an outsider, as someone who has a true love of image-making and someone who along the way has learned from and is excited by so many different kinds of artists, and is a fan of a lot of different kinds of artists.”

However, he said, “it became clear to myself and my peers…that the work I was making in the editorial space had a very clear point of view” that would translate well to the context of a museum or gallery exhibition. Thus he was invited to present in that context and he never looked back.

About the difference between working in photography and in visual art, Mitchell doesn’t see a tremendous amount of variance, the only such difference being “the box or the context.”

“For fashion is traditionally the page, for art the context is traditionally the cube,” he said. “Photography is a beautiful medium because it works seamlessly in both. It has had to fight for its place in the art marketplace, which I’m less interested in. And more interested in just how the gallery, specifically on this occasion, SCAD, affords me the space to think expansively about what images can do.”