On view from November 15, 2025 through February 1, 2026 in the Newmark Gallery, Iron + Palm Wine is a solo exhibition from artist and musician YATTA which uses video, sound, digital collage, and a series of original interviews to reimagine the pastoral as a site of reckoning, rather than escape. The show is framed by the music of renowned Sierra Leonean guitarist S. E. Rogie, a pioneer of palm wine music and YATTA’s great uncle. Palm wine—a form of fingerpicking guitar music created by merchant sailors in coastal West African cities at the turn of the century—was an early foundational style of West African guitar music and a historically significant precursor to globally popular genres such as highlife and soukous. In addition to influencing these genres, palm wine music was popular among 2000s-era indie-folk musicians in the United States.

Positioning these histories as a backdrop, Iron + Palm Wine uses music as a lens through which to examine a romantic, colonial notion of nature exploration and leisure that YATTA names “the white wander.” For YATTA, the white wander is “unburdened, meadow, Walden, Thoreau. White wander scores earth music. Earth music is Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, and Iron & Wine—music that reaches towards a rootedness that, I think, can only be found in a real, real way, on the continent of Africa.” Inspired by their research into the connections between these sounds and their reflections on nature culture, YATTA seeks to posit West African guitar music and Black wandering as “a balm for the psychic wounds” of the transatlantic slave trade and the fraught relationship that Black people have had to land in the United States as a result of forced migration and labor.

By presenting interviews with scholars Jamal Khadar and Mississippi Records director Cyrus Moussavi, as well as a newly commissioned performance film made in collaboration with filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Yeelen Cohen, Iron + Palm Wine engages in a form of scholarly inquiry based in YATTA’s practice as a musician, operating with the understanding that the musics with which the exhibition engages are active, alive, and moving into the future. By acknowledging the possibility of this futurity, YATTA constructs an expanded cultural framework within which those historically excluded from pastoral mythology can restore their relationship to the earth, reclaiming ease, leisure, and the right to wander.

This exhibition is curated by Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant.

Special Thanks:

Jazmin Jones

Yeelen Cohen 

Syd Yocom 

Derek Schultz 

Jamal Khadar

Cyrus Moussavi

Rogee Rogers

Otto Ohle

Eric Margan 

Stella Wren Ramos 

Carlos Hernandez

Mississippi Records 

9H family past and present 

ABOUT YATTA

YATTA is a Sierra Leonean-American artist and composer whose work spans experimental music, performance, installation, sculpture and sound art. Their music blends textural electronic elements, looped vocals, and rich storytelling, rooted in improvisation, humor, and surprise. 

They have performed at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Sonic Acts Festival, and New Forms Festival, and have shared stages with artists such as Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Cardi B, Laraaji, L’Rain, and, The Sun Ra Arkestra. A recent MFA graduate from Bard College and a former artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works and Flux Factory, they continue to explore sound as a medium for storytelling, identity, and transformation. Their work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Quietus, Nylon, Fact Magazine, and The Wire.

SUPPORT

Art Omi’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.