Cheers to Our Fidelity

Installation Room Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present an installation of Yaya Bey’s short film Cheers to Our Fidelity, a montage of the Queens-born singer-songwriter’s life over her last four album cycles. The film follows a sequence of videos from Bey’s live performances, studio recordings, and photo shoots, threaded with more intimate clips of bursting fireworks, laughing with friends, and views from the window of her car. The montage resembles both an iPhone video and home movie—a rectangular screen surrounded by TV static that crackles over a blurred red, green, and blue backdrop. Many scenes are narrated with Bey’s thoughts transcribed into yellow captions. As an audience recording of one of her concerts plays, she reflects on her 2025 album, sharing: “ When I released do it afraid, I was desperate to move away from the topic of grief. My work had been received through the lens of loss, album after album. And that grief became the ethos of my work, and I couldn’t escape the perception of me. My grief went from human to specifically Black and tasty on the lips of outsiders, outsiders who have managed to become gatekeepers." The personal grief Bey describes refers to the death of her father, the Juice Crew MC, Grand Daddy I.U., in 2022, in addition to a more collective grief experienced by her Black-American community in Queens. In the neighborhoods where she grew up, gentrification and state violence have displaced native New Yorkers and fractured the Black diaspora. Insisting that the public not make a spectacle of her suffering, Bey’s album reflects an individual breaking point, a moment when she was ready to process and voice the loss of her loved ones and innocence on a public stage—expressing that grief authentically and on her own terms. The film echoes her insight that ignorant, invasive governments and industries must face the universal implications for their destruction of Black livelihood, stating, “Most of the population is maladjusted to the demands of capitalism and the horrors of colonialism. And though Black folks bear the brunt of it, make no mistake. When the world is on, fire everybody burns.” For Bey, bravery does not exist without fear, and this film is evidence of how bravery manifests in this particular moment of her life: fidelity (also the title of her 2026 album). As her narration boldly describes the greatest challenges individuals and societies have to face in this time, the videos she pairs her observations with frame fidelity as a devotion to joy—in art, friendship, and family. This joy is intimate, one that white communities can only comprehend at a distance, noting, “They don’t know the warmth of our homes, the timbre of our laughter. What we have lost is absolutely unquantifiable. Be that as it is, we are religiously joyful.” Such as in the concluding scenes of Cheers to our Fidelity, in which a group of people at an event dance in sync to Frankie Beverly and Maze’s 1981 track Before I Let Go by, it is in the recognition, rather than denial, of life’s simultaneous tragedy and beauty, that Bey accesses persistence in the face of fire. Yaya Bey is an American singer-songwriter from Queens, New York, known for her introspective, genre-blending approach to contemporary R&B. Born Hidaiyah Bey, she creates music that weaves together elements of soul, jazz, hip-hop, and reggae, exploring the lineage of Black music while delving into themes of Black womanhood, healing, grief, and joy. Her work is both nuanced and deeply personal, often reflecting her life experiences and emotional resilience. Emerging from New York's underground scene, she gained wider recognition with projects like Madison Tapes (2020) and her critically acclaimed album Remember Your North Star (2022), which earned "Best New Music" honors and showcased her candid, poetic storytelling. The daughter of rapper Grand Daddy I.U., Bey has accomplished much, but remains most proud of one thing above all else — that she's stayed human.

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