CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/8/2021

Celebrate Black History with 'Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night'

Titled "A Passion Like No Other," this mesmerizing 2012 oil painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is reproduced from Fly In League With The Night, published to accompany the first major survey of the artist's work, on view at Tate through May 2021. Featuring 120 color reproductions and texts by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker, Elizabeth Alexander and Yiadom-Boakye, who is also a gifted writer, this is a must-have book for all home, academic, gallery and museum art libraries, as well as one of our top Black History Month Staff Picks for 2021. "In Yiadom-Boakye’s mode of portraiture, fictionalized subjects of even temperament are the unwavering coordinates within which she quarries states of quiet conviviality and contemplation," Andrea Schlieker writes. "Their gaze elicits empathy, their very lassitude relays an urgent call: in a world dominated by an inflation of images, words and noise, of continually expanding metropoles, ever greater pressures of work and the increasing velocity of life, it becomes both psychologically and politically important to assert these spaces of stillness and repose, places in which people are doing nothing. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze spoke of the importance of 'providing little gaps of solitude and silence… because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.' Yiadom-Boakye paints these 'little gaps of solitude and silence' and distils profound emotions into a single glance or small gesture brimming with eloquence. She posits tranquility as a form of resistance, serenity as meaningful act."