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Tyler Mitchell’s Art-Historical Mood Board

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyTyler Mitchell, the thirty-year-old photography phenom, has enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise in the fashion and art worlds since graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts less than a decade ago. In 2018, he became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue, capturing Beyoncé in a frilly white prairie dress with an elaborate headpiece that simultaneously recalled Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fantastical paintings, Frida Kahlo’s elaborate flower crowns, and Carmen Miranda’s fruit-basket hats. He has since done campaigns for fashion houses including Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, Balenciaga, Loewe, and Wales Bonner, and photographed for the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” He has had two solo exhibitions at the Gagosian gallery, which now represents him, and has been the subject of a handful of museum shows in the United States and Europe, including “Wish This Was Real,” currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris.

Tyler Mitchell’s Art-Historical Mood Board

Credit: ByChris WileyDecember 20, 2025

Key Highlights

  • A hefty, handsome book of the same name, released recently by Aperture, features a diverse, almost absurdly heavy-hitting list of contributors including Anna Wintour, Rashid Johnson, and Drew Sawyer, the co-curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial.
  • “How lucky we all are,” Wintour writes in her essay, “to witness such a wizard at work.”“Time for A New Sky,” 2020.“In a Landscape,” 2023.“Cage,” 2022.“Gingham Boys,” 2021. Visually, Mitchell’s images are sumptuous, stylish, and seductive, channelling the old-school photographic glamour epitomized by Richard Avedon, one of Mitchell’s idols.
  • Conceptually, Mitchell’s work has its roots in his undergraduate education at N. Y. U.
  • A mentor there was the artist and photographic historian Deborah Willis, whose scholarly excavations of photographs of Black beauty, stretching back to the nineteenth century, furnished Mitchell with a framework for his own art.
  • By the time he made his Vogue cover, he had settled into a signature approach: harking back to Willis’s archive, and to the work of the photographer Kwame Brathwaite, a pioneer of the Black Is Beautiful movement, Mitchell committed to the enshrinement of Black splendor.
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Sources

  1. Tyler Mitchell’s Art-Historical Mood Board

This quick summary is automatically generated using AI based on reports from multiple news sources. The content has not been reviewed or verified by humans. For complete details, accuracy, and context, please refer to the original published articles.

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