Iron + Palm Wine

ABOUT
PALM WINE
SOUND
IRON + PALM WINE
TALKS
FATHAGOD.EXE

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 to: 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, and 9H family past and present.