Riverside Scene

2021

Riverside Scene, 2021. Tyler Mitchell (American, b. 1995). Inkjet print; framed: 163.8 x 205.7 x 6.3 cm (64 1/2 x 81 x 2 1/2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 2021.178 Born and raised in Atlanta, Tyler Mitchell in this staged scene transforms the Georgia landscape, a place of historical trauma for Black people, into an Eden that offers them instead leisure, refuge, and rootedness. Mitchell imbued the image with a soft focus and misty golden glow that evoke the languor of a humid summer day in Georgia and the haziness of an imagined memory. In 2018 at age twenty-three, Tyler Mitchell was the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue in the magazine’s 126-year history.