Time for a New Sky II

Tyler Mitchell is known for his vibrant, playfully theatrical compositions that foreground the style and beauty of Black subjects, often within pastoral landscapes and familiar domestic settings. Frequently situated between the real and the imagined, his photographs draw from conventions of portraiture, fashion, and film to create compositions that offer visions of empowerment, tenderness, and camaraderie. Mitchell’s work explores the visual and emotional textures of the American South, where he is from—a tire swing over a muddy lake, hula-hooping in a school parking lot—not as simple emblems of nostalgia, but as charged sites where play, pleasure, and leisure coexist.

In Time for a New Sky II, a solitary figure stands atop a painted scenic sky backdrop, attempting to pull this artificial scene over the actual sky above him, as if ushering in the dusk. Reflecting Mitchell’s ongoing interest in bodily suspension and one’s relationship to the sky, this dreamlike work captures a tension between the natural and the constructed, mirroring the High Line’s own identity as an invented landscape suspended above the city. With the monumental New York skyline visible behind it, Time for a New Sky II is, ultimately, a work about self-possession and possibility: the whole sky gathered in one figure’s hands.