The New Museum presented an evening of readings written or selected by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, on the occasion of her exhibition “Under-Song For A Cipher.”
A cast of New York–based performers read texts by authors including Roald Dahl, Charles Baudelaire, James Baldwin, and Yiadom-Boakye herself in a special summer public program taking place in the New Museum’s Sky Room.
Yiadom-Boakye’s creative practice moves between visual art and literature. As both a writer and a painter, she creates quotidian and otherworldly characters who emerge and develop on the page or the canvas, remaining distinct to the medium in which they were rendered. For this program, Olivia Rose Barresi, Carol Carter, Maurice McPherson, and Yvonna Pearson read poetry, short stories, and scripts selected by Yiadom-Boakye, exploring what emerges when these texts become unmoored from their time and place of origin.