Jamal Cyrus: BMW Art Journey
Detail from MSY, 2018.
Jamal Cyrus' travels in 2018 followed migrations within the "Afro-Atlantic," the geographies marked by trade routes that have developed diverse cultural and philosophical hybrids between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. These richly complex hybrids—molded by forces of conquest, colonization, slavery, industry, migration, and philosophy—are visible in the architecture, music, design, and language surrounding Cyrus’s destinations: Elmina Castle in Accra, Ghana; the Theatre Champs-Elysees in Paris, France; Brixton's Electric Avenue in London, England; the Alhambra in Granada, Spain; and Congo Square in New Orleans, United States.
Building on the experiences of his travel-research, Cyrus will exhibit four works that take hybridity as their material. In his signature style, these works explore the overlapping spiritual and metaphysical transformations signaled by music, faith, and protest.
The Alhambra, in Granada, is a richly layered historical site: built by the Moors as a fortress in the 9th century, it sits atop the remains of Roman fortifications. It was later renovated in the mid-13th century by the Emirate of Granada to become a palace and further developed in the 14th century by the Sultan of Granada. Later additions to the architecture were made in the Mannerist style of the 16th century on the orders of two of the Holy Roman Emperors, Charles I and V, but these renovations were never completed. A palimpsest of historical architectural styles, the building holds centuries of layered history interwoven with significant moments of colonial place-making: in the 15th century, the Alhambra became the royal court of Ferdinand & Isabella, the site from which Christopher Columbus launched his voyage to what would become the Americas.
In For Adeyinka, Cyrus looks to Moorish traditions, which he found strangely erased in this area of Spain. Here, he uses Yoruba beadwork to embellish a crown, which sits on a turban, in homage to the Moors. From the turban, he hangs a silk chiffon veil printed with an iconic photograph of Malcom X, taken by Don Hogan Charles and printed in the September 1964 issue of Ebony magazine. When it was first published, the photograph’s caption outlined Malcolm X’s revolutionary philosophy, in which he insists on the importance of overturning systems and structures of power that had enforced inequality, and doing so by any means necessary. Here, histories are stacked and blended in a revolutionary remix of historical moments and cultural signs of power. For Adeyinka “exists in an unsettled place,” Cyrus says. “It’s not rooted in a time: it could exist in the future or the past.”
For the past two decades, Jamal Cyrus has consistently envisioned points of connection between the present and the past, between history, music, protest, and ritual. In his work, he excavates and juxtaposes cultural moments, using materials that are densely evocative. Cyrus's work is meditation and commemoration, a distillation of political and social struggles, and an exploration of how improvisation can offer potent re-imaginings of history. With the installation of these four works, Cyrus has constructed a kind of imaginary museum space in which functional objects—clothing, musical instruments, quilts—are made from the productive collision of cultural referents. These objects hold the evocative overlap of seemingly diverse, but connected, places.
Cyrus’s BPPGG, for example, takes the black leather jacket often associated with the Black Panther Party and sews talismanic pouches on it, making it a gris-gris object. In this potent remix, the leather jacket pulls together a U.S.-born political revolutionary figure with Caribbean-based magic and protective traditions of Malian hunters, who carry physical salves and religious texts with them, sewn into their hunting vests. The jacket is hung behind a curtain, making it something of a ghostly presence or revered ceremonial object: as Cyrus notes, ceremonial drums in Haiti are often stored behind curtains until activated for their ritual use.
Jet Auto Archive - April 27, May 11, May 25, 1992 (Medicated L. A. Kente) continues Cyrus’s Jet series, in which he uses his personal collection of Jet Magazine issues from the 90s to make intricately woven collages. In some of these works, Cyrus traces a fall from the dream: begun as a progressive site for writing about Black culture, Jet Magazine eventually became an advertising-driven magazine, coopting the original politics of the publication to target Black consumer power instead. In Medicated L. A. Kente, Cyrus uses multiple issues of the magazine to create a commemorative collage for Los Angeles, inspired by Kente cloth and quiltmaking in the U.S. South. Here, the Jet issues he repurposes all come from April and May of 1992, the month of the Rodney King beating by L. A. police and their subsequent acquittal, which led to city-wide unrest.
Cyrus textures his work with the patterning and rhythm of Ghanaian textiles. The process of transforming used fabrics (or, in this case, images) into something new, made for comfort and healing, is a nod to Southern quilt-making traditions. Like BPPGG, this work has phylacteries sewn into it. These 13 amulet devices, often small bundles with a spiritual or protective text folded into them, are a kind of gris-gris medication, healing their wearer—in this case, Los Angeles—and warding off evil. In Cyrus’s amulets, he’s placed short excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, drawn from the chapter “Saved,” in which Malcolm X outlines his transformational religious conversion and self-education in prison. After receiving a letter from Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm X began to write daily letters to the spiritual leader, learning to read in the process. He then avidly studied Black history, beginning in the U.S. and expanding into international history, filling in the blanks left by the whitened history taught in schools. He read deeply in philosophy and religion, transforming his understanding of the world and developing his own revolutionary philosophy.
Throughout his work, Cyrus makes resonant explorations of the visual culture of Black music as a lived experience of resistance. His ongoing Pride Record Findings project, begun in 2005, invents an imaginary 1960s-era record label, installing the label’s records in store displays that chronicle the shifting politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the Civil Rights Movement. In 2016, he completed a major public commission in downtown Houston in which he layered posters announcing a 1975 Lightnin' Hopkins performance at Liberty Hall. Another body of work draws from blues posters that Cyrus splatters with corn grits. Music is inherently a medium that riffs and quotes from itself, transmuting diverse influences into rich new mixtures. Even as it visualizes itself, music is a gumbo of citations and cross-pollinations (Interestingly, in one such instance, Nicki Minaj recreated the Malcolm X photograph Cyrus uses in [Yoruba Crown] for a single she released in 2014 to widespread criticism: which is to say, music cites from visual culture as much as from history, literature, and other musical precedents).
Cyrus’s sculpture MSY consists of a conch shell trumpet case in bronze alongside two mutes: one made of clay, and one of root. Used throughout the Caribbean, the conch shell is an evocative instrument, employed for political protest and ceremony. In 1791, the instrument helped organize a rebellion by the enslaved peoples in Haiti. There, the sound of the shell-trumpet continues to represent hope, strength, resistance, and self-determination. It is still often used to announce a community meeting. Alongside the conch shell’s history, Cyrus cites shifts in U.S.-based protest movements, considering how they have at various times incorporated music and spirituality as part of protest: think, for example, of how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had a group of traveling musicians, the Freedom Singers, active throughout the early 1960s. Cyrus’s conch shell and mutes are titled MSY after the airport in New Orleans—Louis Armstrong International Airport—and the sculpture compounds the legacy of the brilliant trumpet player with travel, thinking about both music and travel as having revolutionary potential. “As sound moves through the mutes,” Cyrus says, “it is fundamentally changed.” The same might be said for the human experience of travelling: it deeply alters one’s constitution, adding new depths and layers of references to one’s daily experiences.
Over the past two decades, Jamal Cyrus has consistently envisioned points of connection between the present and the past, between history and the radical potential within the present. In his work, he excavates and juxtaposes cultural moments, using materials that are heavy with the layers of meaning they bear in a culture marked by unresolved racial tensions. He imagines metaphysical encounters that are a salve for these tensions, a medicine for moments in which music is silenced. Indeed, Cyrus's revision of American history fuses popular culture, ritual practice, and Black history to envision alternative points of connection and to find voices forgotten by a history that privileges narratives built on erasure. His work is meditation and commemoration, a distillation of political and social struggles of the past and a tribute to resistance, cultural exchange, and resilience as fundamental tools of survival.
Artist biography
Jamal Cyrus (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received his BFA from the University of Houston (2004) and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2008). In 2005, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and in 2010 he was an Artist in Residence at Artpace San Antonio. Cyrus won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Artadia Houston Award, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has participated in national and international exhibitions, including Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2017); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 – Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (traveled to ICA Philadelphia, 2016); Arresting Patterns, ArtSpace, New Haven, CT (traveled to the African American Museum in Philadelphia, 2016); two exhibitions at the Studio Museum, Harlem (both 2013); the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2012); the New Museum, New York (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); the Museum of London Docklands, London (2009); and The Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp (2007). In 2006, Cyrus was included in the Whitney Biennial, titled Day for Night, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Cyrus is a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. With the collective, Cyrus has exhibited at Prospect.4 The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans (2017), Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2014), Project Row Houses, Houston (2014), the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2008), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC (2008), the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2008), the Menil Collection, Houston (2007), the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and Clementine Gallery, New York (2006). Cyrus’s and Otabenga Jones's work has been reviewed in Artlies, The Houston Chronicle, Houston Magazine, and The New York Times.