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Khalif Tahir Thompson Reflects On Life in Brooklyn and His Living Collages at Victoria Miro

The New York painter has expanded his family archive into a layered portrait of neighborhood life, Y2K culture and the city that shaped him.

“Send in the Clowns,” Khalif Tahir Thompson’s debut with Victoria Miro this October, ranks among the most anticipated shows opening around Frieze London this year. A Yale MFA graduate based in Brooklyn, Thompson has attracted collector and institutional attention for his distinctive approach to portraiture, particularly the way it expands into, and is mirrored by, constructed psychological environments. Beginning with family archival material and intimate portrayals of domestic everyday life, his work has gradually turned toward the layered, entangled forces at play in the lives of individuals and families within a particular neighborhood and, more broadly, within the complex, sprawling urban environment of New York.

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Observer met the artist at his Bushwick loft studio before the works traveled to London; he described them as a further evolution of a practice he has been developing over several years. “I started working with family imagery from the family archive. I did a lot of interiors and domestic spaces,” Thompson said. “For this show, I was really interested in bringing in more current lives and current scenes.”

"Send in the Clowns" Artist: Khalif Tahir Thompson Venue: Victoria Miro Address: 16 Wharf Road, London Through: November 7, 2026

A turning point in his practice came after his grandmother’s death, when he found boxes of photo albums that had sat in storage for 16 years, which he has called a visual “gold mine.” Collectively, they also told the history of communities often excluded from mainstream media narratives—a portal into the evolution of Black life in the city, and Brooklyn life more generally, over recent decades. With “Send in the Clowns,” Thompson stages a compelling dialectical encounter, bringing the archive into contact with present-day Brooklyn and the scenes he encounters now, as if trying to track a way of life that has vanished and, in a city like New York, always moving fast and moving on, left very few traces.

The idea to create a show about home, Brooklyn and his return to New York took shape after Thompson finished graduate school and left New Haven following the pandemic. The density and pace of the city made a strong........

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