'To Douse the Devil for a Ducat', 2015, oil on canvasCourtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London

Vogue.com profiles London artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose work will be shown from May 3-2017 thru September 9-2017 at New York's New Museum. The museum's artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, who featured her work in his 2013 Venice Biennale, says that her work has a particular urgency.

“In a moment of racial tension like the one America has been living through, Lynette’s characters take on a completely different weight and presence,” he says. “It’s hard not to feel implicated as a viewer—I can’t help thinking that her imagined characters are engaging with me.”

These powerful paintings of black women and men -- all of them fictional -- are increasingly influential in contemporary culture. Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the 2013 Turner Prize and comes to New York after solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Kunsthalle in Basel.

The artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, photographed in her London studio, paints fast, timeless portraits in oils. Her solo show at the New Museum in New York opens this May.Photographed by Anton Corbijn, *Vogue*, April 2017

One wonders if Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can offer insights into the current intellectual chaos whirling around Dana Schutz' 'Open Casket' painting of Emmett Till, part of the Whitney Bienniale

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