In the “At the Galleries” column from our June 25, 2026, issue, Lovia Gyarkye writes about an exhibition of work by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Yiadom-Boakye is most known for painting solitary, serene figures that nonetheless possess, as Gyarkye writes, “a sly, even conspiratorial edge.” The Shainman show, which features new paintings and works on paper, has an “element of mischief,” combining funereal scenes with a series of portraits of people eating cheeky fingerfuls of pie.
Gyarkye is a former staff writer at The Hollywood Reporter; an editor at Hammer and Hope, a magazine of black politics and culture; and a lively critic whose work has appeared in many publications and a broad range of genres, including film, literary, and, of course, art criticism. We corresponded recently over email about the history of black figurative art, her favorite new films, and which Disney Channel Original my children should watch to learn about a particularly brutal chapter of South African apartheid.
Nawal Arjini: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye looms large in the discussion about contemporary figuration, especially black figuration—what do you make of the genre (or to what extent do you even think it is one), and the discussion around it?
Lovia Gyarkye: I was suspicious of how the mainstream art world glommed onto this most recent chapter in black figuration, as if the value of black art depended on its legibility. My skepticism grew in 2020, when institutions scrambled to reckon with their fraught histories as a response to protests against the murder of George Floyd and police brutality more broadly. Suddenly, there was an increased interest in figurative works by black artists, but this hypervisibility didn’t lead to the most sophisticated analysis of the artworks or the lineage in which they existed. At the time I found it all kind of boring but looking back now I realize I wasn’t engaging in the most interesting versions of these conversations to begin with. My aversion was an angsty response to the myopic way that mainstream, often majority-white institutions talked about black art more generally, which tended toward clichés about social justice and the power that lived experiences have to generate empathy and foster tolerance.
I felt such relief when I first came across Yiadom-Boakye’s work, which is so beguiling and mischievous. Along with the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, she advanced my understanding of figuration’s possibilities. Her work reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi’s novels; there is a fondness for myth, for understanding why we’re drawn to stories and for embracing the fun of imagined worlds. Yiadom-Boakye never anchors her characters to a place—they are completely unmoored and yet so often at ease. How freeing is that? It encourages viewers to engage with the work on its own terms and not to lean on sociology, which I think we tend to do when analyzing art by black artists.
Why do you think black figurative painters are so popular right now, especially at big institutions?
I think part of it has to do with the fact that representation is inspiring, even though it seems chic to reject it. Earlier conversations about black artists’ figurative painting always seemed to align with a thesis about the power of seeing black people rendered so elegantly in a medium most popularly associated with the Western (usually presumed as white) art world. For better or worse, that is meaningful.
I also think, on an individual level, the kind of legibility we associate with figuration invites a more direct engagement with the subject. Abstracted works can provoke and challenge in ways that can be frustrating. I find that as a viewer they require you to let go a bit and be OK with misunderstanding. I’m less forgiving of the institutional interest in black figurative painters because of my skepticism of their motives, but I also wonder why they seem to take less interest in black abstraction.
You’re a longtime film critic; what are some films you’ve seen recently that were worth seeing?
I still feel so green compared to some of my peers. Since leaving The Hollywood Reporter, I haven’t been watching films at the same rate as I used to. I’m watching what interests me without having to form an immediate opinion. Working at a trade magazine meant I covered a wide range of movies, even ones I thought no one could pay me to see. (I guess they could.)
Still, I’ve seen and have been thinking about some great films of late. One is Clarissa, a really inspired take on Mrs. Dalloway by the Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri that premiered at Cannes this year. Adapting Woolf’s novel allows the Esiris to reveal the colonial undercurrents within Nigerian society, and also grapple with present-day class tensions in Lagos as well as the Nigerian military’s authority.
Clarissa uses this grammar I’ve noticed in a lot of recent films by young black artists, from Raven Jackson to RaMell Ross, which embraces fragmentation and nonlinearity. This isn’t a new style, per se, because you can find traces of it in the work of Terrence Malick or Julie Dash, but I have been wondering why it seems to fit the moment, and whether it risks becoming a gimmick.
Another great film I saw recently is Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which was started in 1972 by William Greaves and finished by his son David, and will come out in the fall. The documentary is composed entirely of footage from a meeting of the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1970s at Duke Ellington’s apartment. It’s thrilling to hear these luminaries reflect on and relitigate the issues of their times.
Now a question for my own personal benefit: Do you have any children’s movie recommendations?
Enthusiastically yes: I covered a lot of children’s movies when I was reviewing full time, and I take them quite seriously. So many of them are terrible because they treat children like idiots. Recent children’s films I’ve liked include The Wild Robot, which features some incredible voice acting from Lupita Nyong’o, and Claude Barras’s Sauvages,a stop-motion movie about a group of Indigenous people trying to protect their home and way of life from unchecked corporate greed. I’m not sure if that film was ever released in the United States, but I saw it a few years ago at Cannes. It impressed me because it doesn’t try to sugarcoat the realities of environmental catastrophe or corporate greed, in the way a lot of American films do, but it nonetheless maintains the accessible emotional texture of a children’s movie.
I didn’t grow up in a film-watching family; I often joke that I was raised on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Disney Channel Original movies, and whatever African films played at the braiding shop. Brandy as Cinderella remains an inspired choice. If the 2000 Disney Channel movie The Color of Friendship, which tells a surprisingly bracing story about the injustices of South African apartheid, including a third-act development centered on the horrific murder of Steve Biko, were made today, you know Disney would try to kumbaya the whole story.
The films I watched in the hair salon were often about a woman named Beyonce—no relation to the pop star—who falls in love with a man who is engaged to another woman. From my vague memory, the first film is a kind of straightforward narrative drama and the sequel—The Return of Beyonce—involved more magical realism, crime, and revenge. These films were contemporaneous with Nollywood movies, which also got a lot of play at the shop. This mix of early film watching must have contributed to the openness and perhaps contradictions of my taste.
Besides New York, what are some great moviegoing cities?
I do think New York is particularly incredible: there’s so much on offer here. Outside of Cannes and Venice, New York hosts my favorite major film festival, the New York Film Festival. The selection is consistently adventurous. New York is also home to the African Film Festival, which brings an array of works by people from both the continent and its diaspora. There are also hyperlocal ventures like Alfreda’s Cinema, in Brooklyn, which does some incredible programming. I’m sure somewhere in Los Angeles or Paris, someone is cursing me, but I stand by this truth.
Could you tell our readers a bit more about Hammer and Hope, where you’re an editor?
I love when I get to talk about Hammer and Hope, a quarterly digital magazine founded by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Jen Parker. I only started working there last September, but I can say that even in the last year the ambitious, high-quality work we have published makes me really proud. I was brought on to help expand their arts coverage, and it’s been a fun challenge: there’s a dearth of rigorous culture writing in general but especially when it comes to black art, and I hope the magazine’s pages can be a place where writers embrace tension. We’ve done a lot of cool stories since I’ve been there, including a roundtable of critics applying analytical pressure to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners; an essay about the conservative undercurrents of so-called “Blackbusters”—those films from the late 1990s and early 2000s, like Waiting to Exhale and Love and Basketball, that represented a golden age of Black cinema—and profiles of folks like Angela Flournoy and Raoul Peck, the latter of which I wrote. The magazine is free to read, but right now we’re trying to grow our membership program, which helps fund all of these pieces.
In other outlets, your writing ranges across a broad spectrum, from Katie Kitamura’s novels to Stuart Hall. What sorts of writers and topics have you been particularly interested in working on (especially in an editorial capacity) at Hammer and Hope?
I’m focused on work that has real stakes and ideas that might feel scary to articulate. I think there’s freedom in that risk. I feel lucky that a magazine like this exists, and I want to take advantage of that by encouraging my writers to think ambitiously. I’m always saying if there’s an essay you’ve been putting off and you don’t think will work anywhere, let’s talk about it. That’s how Ian F. Blair’s essay about the Blackbuster came to be.
I’m trying to do this in my own work too. I’m excited to have the time to nurture my intellectual life. I’ve been trying to write about the rapper Noname since I started my career because I find her political journey so fascinating. She’s part of a history of artists and activists who have used reading groups, bookstores, and libraries to engage in meaningful political education. I owe the Review an essay on Anna Julia Cooper and the development of a black feminist critical style, which I’ve been thinking about for years. Emily, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. In general, I’m honing my thoughts on black women’s cultural production, especially that of the working class.
For the past decade or more there’s been a growing interest among Americans for translated literature, foreign films, international TV—to what extent is this syncretic with the already extant streams of black internationalism, and especially to black American interest in culture across the black Atlantic? Or are these separate strains?
I do think to some extent these are separate. Black internationalism implies a shared politics grounded in anti-imperial and decolonial movements, whereas the recent black American interest in culture across the black Atlantic doesn’t require that. This is a topic I’ve been discussing a lot with my friend Jazmine Hughes, who has been focusing on this subject for a book project. If we aren’t careful, interest divorced from real solidarity risks reinforcing certain imperial behaviors and attitudes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Pan-Africanism recently. Last summer, I reviewed Howard French’s wonderful book The Second Emancipation, which functions as both a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and a retelling of cold war history that puts Africa’s independence movements at the center. There seems to be a wider interest in trying to understand the cultural thread of Pan-Africanism, as well. I’m thinking specifically of Oluremi C. Onabanjo’s Portraits of Africa exhibition at MoMa and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, which I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago last year, both wonderful shows.
You seem extremely busy, but are there any projects you’re working on that you can share, or any forthcoming books/films/shows you’ve got your eye on?
Ha! I always swear I’m not that busy. My immediate extracurricular focus is a hybrid residency I’m launching for arts writers and editors based in Ghana. The project is inspired by Okyeame, a literary magazine that was published by cultural workers like Kofi Awoonor, Efua Sutherland, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo in the wake of Ghanaian independence. I’m trying to very humbly continue the legacy of the publication, which shuttered in 1972, by gathering some of the writers and editors who are currently shaping Ghana’s arts landscape and offering them financial support, editorial guidance, and connections with venues to publish the work they are already doing. After that, I’m going to take a break from doing one million jobs and start thinking about my book project. I’d love to spend some time thinking deeply on one subject.