Jamal Cyrus

Last updated

Jamal Cyrus (born 1973) is an American conceptual artist who works in a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, textiles, assemblage, installation, performance, and sound. [1] [2] [3] His artistic and research practices investigates the history, culture, and identity of the United States, questioning conventional narratives and foregrounding Black political movements, social justice concerns, and the experiences and impact of the African diaspora, including Black music. [1] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Contents

Biography

Cyrus was born in Houston, Texas, where he lives and works. [6] [11] He received a BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005. In 2008, he graduated from the MFA program at the University of Pennsylvania. [12] Cyrus was an artist-in-residence at Artpace San Antonio in 2010 and a member of the Otabenga Jones and Associates artist collective from 2002 to 2017. [11] [13]

Jamal Cyrus has been married to artist Leslie Hewitt since 2021.

Art Work

Jamal Cyrus's "Pride Frieze--Jerry White's Record Shop, Central Avenue, Los Angeles" (2005-17) is a work that demonstrates Cyrus's interest in historiography and archival research, sculpture and assemblage, and Black American history, especially music. It is a painstaking reconstruction of a record shop storefront Cyrus saw in a book, featuring a hybrid of real and imagined histories of the Detroit-based "Pride Records" label, with found album covers, altered album covers, and total inventions. This photo was shared in the promotional press packet for the announcement of Jamal Cyrus as the winner of the 6th BMW Art Journey and is one of his most recognizable works. Jamal Cyrus's Pride Frieze BMW Art Journey Press.jpg
Jamal Cyrus's "Pride Frieze—Jerry White’s Record Shop, Central Avenue, Los Angeles" (2005-17) is a work that demonstrates Cyrus's interest in historiography and archival research, sculpture and assemblage, and Black American history, especially music. It is a painstaking reconstruction of a record shop storefront Cyrus saw in a book, featuring a hybrid of real and imagined histories of the Detroit-based "Pride Records" label, with found album covers, altered album covers, and total inventions. This photo was shared in the promotional press packet for the announcement of Jamal Cyrus as the winner of the 6th BMW Art Journey and is one of his most recognizable works.

Cyrus's artistic practice is research-based; he makes use of physical and digital archives to investigate American history and historiography through the lens of Black oppression, liberation, and identity. [14] [15] [16] Working in a range of media and materials, his works combine found images, documents, and objects with paper, graphite, papyrus, denim, and other materials, and includes mixed-media installations, assemblages, sculptures, drawings, performances, sound, and video. [14] [17] [18] In referencing material and iconographic aspects of Black history alongside historical events, interpretations, tropes, fabulations, and mythologies, Cyrus's work addresses themes such as counterculture, surveillance, militancy, revolution, and consumerism. [14] [17] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23]

Exhibitions

Cyrus has exhibited widely in both solo and group shows. His work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Art Basel Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Akron Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Asia Society, the New Museum, the Kitchen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of London Docklands. [2] [4] [6] [12] [17] [19] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]

In addition, as a member of Otabenga Jones and Associates, Cyrus exhibited at the High Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, the California African American Museum, and the Menil Collection, among other venues. [2] [6] [11]

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Driskell</span> American painter, scholar, and curator (1931–2020)

David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, is named in his honor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blaffer Art Museum</span> Museum at the University of Houston

Blaffer Art Museum is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in the Arts District of the University of Houston campus. Housed in the university’s Fine Arts Building, it is part of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. It was founded in 1973 and has won several awards, including the Coming Up Taller Award as part of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. The museum presents focus and major monographic and group exhibitions of national and international contemporary artists as well as artwork by University of Houston School of Art students.

Janet Biggs is an American visual artist, known for her work in video, photography and interdisciplinary performance art. Biggs lives and works in New York City.

Williams is the first African American artist to be featured in The Janson History Of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willie Cole</span> American sculptor

Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual and visual artist. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African-American imagery. He also has used Dada’s readymades and Surrealism’s transformed objects, as well as icons of American pop culture or African and Asian masks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanya Kahn</span> American video artist

Stanya Kahn is an American artist. She graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State University and received an MFA in 2003 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Kahn lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Villegas</span>

Jason Villegas is a San Francisco based contemporary artist. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Villegas' work includes sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, textile, video and performance, exploring concepts such as globalism, evolution, sexuality, cosmology, and consumerism. Motifs in Villegas' artworks include fashion logos, animal hybrids, weaponry, sales banners, clothing piles, anuses, cosmic debris, taxidermy, bear men, amorphous beasts, religious iconography, and party scenarios.

Arnold J. Kemp is an American artist who works in painting, print, sculpture, and poetry. After graduating from Boston Latin School, Kemp received a BA/BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and an MFA from Stanford University.

Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian contemporary artist who examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, queer subjectivity, and collective agency through interdisciplinary performance that uses installation, video, sculpture, and dance. He currently serves as a faculty member at Northwestern University teaching art theory and practice.

Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steffani Jemison</span> American artist

Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Previously she was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) in Texas. Cassel's work is often focused on representation, inclusivity and highlighting artists of different social and cultural backgrounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autumn Knight</span> American artist

Autumn Knight is an American interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, and text from Houston, Texas who lives and works in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artadia</span> American arts organization

Artadia is an American arts non-profit organization founded in 1999. They are headquartered in New York City, and support visual artists with unrestricted, merit-based financial awards as well as other opportunities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Pruitt (artist)</span>

Robert Pruitt is a visual artist from Houston, Texas living in New York City who is known for his figurative drawings and who also works with sculpture, photography, and animation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliza Myrie</span> American visual artist

eliza myrie is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Myrie works in a variety of media including sculpture, participatory installation art, public art, and printmaking.

Caroline Kent is an American visual artist based in Chicago, best known for her large scale abstract painting works that explore the interplay between language and translation. Inspired by her own personal experiences and her cultural heritage, Kent creates paintings that explore the power and limitations of communication. Her work, influenced by her Mexican heritage, delves into the potentials and confines of language and reconsiders the modernist canon of abstraction. She likens her composition process to choreography, revealing an interconnectedness between language, abstraction, and painting. Kent's artwork showcases an evolving dialogue of space, matter, and time, resulting in a confluence of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and performance, blurring the lines between these mediums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Arcega</span> Filipino-American artist (born 1973)

Michael Arcega is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist who works mainly in sculpture and installation. Critics have described his work as a fusion of accessible materials, meticulous craftsmanship, politically barbed punning and conceptual rigor that balances light-hearted play with serious critique. His practice is informed by history, research, geography and his personal, insider-outsider sensibility as a naturalized Filipino-American; he frequently links historical eras and disparate geographies in order to address the present via the past. While visual, his art is often inspired by bilingual wordplay, jokes and jumbled signifiers. It explores cross-cultural exchange, colonization, sociopolitical dynamics and imbalances, and cultural markers embedded in objects, food, architecture, visual lexicons, and vernacular languages. Sculpture critic Laura Richard Janku wrote that Arcega "melds myriad aspects of past and present, high and low, humor and horror into the messy melting pot of history, politics and culture."

References

  1. 1 2 Harper, Daria Simone (2022-07-14). "In Conversation with Jamal Cyrus". Burnaway. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  2. 1 2 3 "Jamal Cyrus joins permanent collection". Ruby City. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  3. ↑ Zastudil, Nancy (2022-04-12). "The Pace of Place: Jamal Cyrus at The Modern". Arts and Culture Texas. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  4. 1 2 Glentzer, Molly (2021-07-15). "Houston Artist Jamal Cyrus's Playful, Subversive Vision of Black History". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  5. 1 2 Valentine, Victoria L. (2020-02-13). "Houston-Based Artist Jamal D. Cyrus on Receiving 2020 David C. Driskell Prize: 'The Symbolism is Extremely Important to Me'". Culture Type. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "FOCUS: Jamal Cyrus". Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 2022. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  7. ↑ Tipton, Cammie (April 2022). "Jamal Cyrus". Public Art: University of Houston System. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  8. ↑ Harris, Alysia Nicole (2022-11-17). "The Art of Black Regard". Scalawag. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  9. ↑ Baker, Susan J. (2022). "Soundwaves: Experimental Strategies in Art + Music [Review]". Venue: A Digital Journal of the Midwest Art History Society. 1 (1): 154–159.
  10. ↑ Beckwith, Naomi; Roelstraete, Dieter (2015). The freedom principle: experiments in art and music, 1965 to now. Chicago (Ill.) London: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in association with The University of Chicago Press. ISBN   978-0-226-31930-8.
  11. 1 2 3 4 "Jamal D. Cyrus". High Museum of Art. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  12. 1 2 3 "Jamal Cyrus". Artadia. 2016-02-12. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  13. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". Inman Gallery. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  14. 1 2 3 Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning [2002]. Los Angeles, CA: The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 2022.
  15. ↑ Chávez, Caitlin Duerler (2021-09-15). "New Historiography for Black Excellence: Jamal Cyrus "The End of My Beginning" at the Blaffer Art Museum". The Art Studio, Inc. Retrieved 2023-05-23.
  16. ↑ Cyrus, Jamal (2021). Bell, Eugenia (ed.). Jamal Cyrus: the end of my beginning. Blaffer Art Museum. Los Angeles, CA: Inventory Press. ISBN   978-1-941753-44-6.
  17. 1 2 3 Dawkins, Chad (2023-04-11). "Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning". Art Papers. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  18. ↑ Cotter, Holland (2012-11-29). "Racial Redefinition in Progress". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-05-23.
  19. 1 2 "Jamal Cyrus The End Of My Beginning". Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  20. ↑ Sealy, Mark, ed. (2020). African cosmologies: photography, time and the other. Amsterdam, NL: Schilt Publishing. ISBN   978-90-5330-932-2.
  21. ↑ Lee, Pamela M. (2020). Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present. MIT Press. p. 228. ISBN   9780262357036.
  22. ↑ Barrett, David (March 2019). "We are the people. Who are you?". Art Monthly (424): 22–23. ProQuest   2224923414 – via ProQuest.
  23. ↑ Stabler, Bert; Waits, Mira Rai (Summer 2022). "Introduction to Visual Arts Research Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing". Visual Arts Research. 48 (1): 1–16. doi: 10.5406/21518009.48.1.01 . S2CID   248929653.
  24. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". P.5 Yesterday We Said Tomorrow. Archived from the original on 2023-05-22. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  25. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning". Mississippi Museum of Art. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  26. ↑ "Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses". Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  27. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". The Whitney 2006 Biennial: Day for Night. 2006. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  28. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". The Studio Museum in Harlem. 2020-09-10. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  29. 1 2 "Jamal Cyrus wins BMW's sixth Art Journey award". Art Basel. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  30. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning". Blaffer Art Museum. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  31. ↑ Dansby, Andrew (2023-04-06). "Houston playwright, visual artist awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for their work in the arts". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  32. ↑ Hawley, Rebecca (May 17, 2023). "Alumnus Reflects on Guggenheim Fellowship". University of Houston. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  33. ↑ "Guggenheim Fellowships Recipients Announced, Jamal Cyrus, Kapwani Kiwanga and Pamela Council are Among the Winners". Widewalls. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  34. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". Joan Mitchell Foundation. 2019-09-25. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  35. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". BMW Art Journey. Archived from the original on 2023-05-22. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  36. ↑ Brennan, Samia. "Smithsonian Awards Fellowships to 10 Artists to Conduct Research at Museums and Research Facilities". Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
  37. ↑ "Jamal Cyrus". The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.