When the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work was exhibited at the New Museum in 2017, viewers were entranced by the way her paintings reflected the deep solitude of each of her subjects. Her figures lounged, stood, or in one instance danced in unadorned, nearly empty interiors composed with broad, feathery brushstrokes. A man almost disappeared into a dark green backdrop while communing with a chestnut-colored owl perched delicately on his right arm. A woman in a white leotard opened into an arabesque, the curves of her torso echoing the two circles—one brown, one black—behind her. Rarely did the concentrated figures face their viewers, but when they did, they wore relaxed, knowing expressions. It was as if Yiadom-Boakye had erected a boundary to protect these solitary Black figures in repose and preserve their serenity.

In “Many a Moonlit Caveat,” an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper at Jack Shainman’s galleries in Chelsea and Tribeca, Yiadom-Boakye instead invites viewers into her subjects’ worlds to gather and grieve with them. In Wake-Keeper (2026), a roughly four-by-five-foot canvas, a pious man draped in the red cloth of traditional Ghanaian funeral attire sits on a stool with his hands clasped, his body facing the left side of the frame. The image is hung low to the ground so that the viewer’s eyes can meet his own and feel what they express: sympathy for the living and devotion to the dead.

Mourners are everywhere in the exhibition. Yiadom-Boakye’s tightly controlled brushstrokes, a departure from the expressive marks in her earlier paintings, convey the sobering clarity that grieving in community can provide. In The Unbending Amaranthine (2026), five men are dressed in traditional black ntoma, or cloth, a striking contrast against the red-orange sky behind them and the forest-green grass under their sandals. As in many non-Western countries, in Ghana—where Yiadom-Boakye’s parents were born and raised before immigrating to the UK in the 1960s—funerals are multiday affairs in which the attendants embrace grief’s contradictions. One day is reserved for cathartic displays of sorrow: crying, wailing, swaying, flinging one’s body to the ground. Another is spent celebrating the life of the deceased and marking their soul’s transition into the ancestral world. We gather to process the vertiginous effect of loss and to stave off the isolation it can bring.

Other, nonfunereal scenes in the exhibition are touched in their own way by an air of mourning and communion. In Jaffa (2025), an elegant pair sits at a table covered in a white cloth and topped with a bowl of whole oranges, a slice of pie, a carafe, and two drinking glasses. One of the diners, wearing a violet collared shirt, holds up an orange, as if demonstrating a point to an unseen audience. The other is also in motion, their gaze turned toward the same implied companion, their fork hovering over the pie. An empty plate at the edge of the canvas invites us into the conversation. Because Jaffa oranges were first cultivated by Arab Palestinian farmers in the nineteenth century, one can’t help but consider the genocide of Palestinian people and see grief in the painting too. Elsewhere in the gallery, three separate images depicting figures indulging in pie—Aux Myrtilles (2026), Aux Citrons (2026), and Aux Framboises (2025)—are hung on adjacent walls, suggesting a shared culinary experience, even though each person is seated at a different table.

For all its sorrow and fellowship, the exhibition does contain an element of mischief. Indeed, Yiadom-Boakye’s work has always possessed a sly, even conspiratorial edge. But what I once read as a self-protective stance now registers as an invitation to imagine alongside her. In “Many a Moonlit Caveat,” mischief is primarily represented by birds, which in many traditions are considered to be blessed with knowledge of the earthly and spiritual realms. There is the raven in Wake-Keeper, and in Red-Capped Manakin (2026), a moody charcoal drawing, a figure’s contorted body seems to reference the famous “moonwalk” mating dance of his tiny namesake. In the drawing Sunbird6 (2026), a man wearing a feathered collar crouches. He is all alone, surrounded by nothing but his shadow and a plain background. With his raised eyebrows, he appears shrewd and defiant. What does he know that we do not?