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Christopher Dean "Chris" Myers is an American multimedia artist and author, whose works across disciplines are rooted in storytelling. Myers delves into the past to build narratives that speak to the slippages between history and mythology. His approach often facilitates connections between other artists.

Early Life and Education
Myers was born in New York City in 1974. He is the son of acclaimed children’s book illustrator Walter Dean Myers, with whom he collaborated on several award-winning children’s picture books. In addition to his career as a visual artist, Myers has written and illustrated several children’s books of his own, and is a recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King awards, as well as various honors. In 2019, Myers established his own book imprint with Random House.

Myers graduated from Brown University in 1995 with a B.A. in Art-Semiotics and American Civilization, and the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Studio Program in 1996. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Work
Christopher Myers’ diverse practice spans textiles, performance, film, and sculptural objects, often created in collaboration with artisans from around the globe. He has worked with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Ho Chi Minh City, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, weavers in Luxor, metal workers in Kenya, and textile printers in Copenhagen. These collaborations are driven by his interest in understanding the ways in which globalization is intimately intertwined with notions of self and community.

Textiles and Tapestries
In his hand-stitched textile works, Myers uses appliqué, a technique that appears often in quilting and banner making, and has developed as a tangible union of diverse cultural and visual practices—African, European, and American. Working with a community of artisans in Luxor, Egypt, Myers created these tapestries with textiles as varied as seventy-year-old sailcloth, Nigerian wedding lace, World Food Programme grain sacks, and cotton harvested in Xinjiang and printed in Vietnam. He uses materials that hold histories—of movement, migration, and exchange—within them. [Hyperlink to AD, Autre Interview]

Tapestries have featured heavily throughout Myers’ exhibitions, including two solo shows at Fort Gansevoort New York and Los Angeles in 2018 and 2020, respectively. [PR for NYC exhibit, PR for LA exhibit] His first solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in New York in 2022 saw the debut of some of his largest textile works to date, such as Sarah Forbes Bonetta as Omoba Aina as Persephone (2021), a 34-foot wide tapestry telling the story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a young Yoruba girl taken from her home and “gifted” to England’s Queen Victoria to be raised as her goddaughter. For Myers, tapestries such as these are grounds for discussing liminal spaces and the in-betweens of identity, showing the interconnectedness of different histories through shared legacies of craft. Figures like Forbes Bonetta speak to the history of colonialism and its impact on the diaspora today, Myers explains: “Her place as an in-betweener, someone not fully home, neither here nor there, presages a lot of folks in the world subsequently. For all of the diaspora, globally, we live on the hyphen, like Sarah Forbes Bonetta, in the space between here and there.” [ – Myers as quoted in ArtDaily]

What Does It Mean to Matter (Community Autopsy) (2019) is a tapestry memorializing victims of brutality at the hands of police and the prison industrial complex, examining the running themes in Myers’ work of freedom, bondage, and legacies of state-sanctioned violence in a particularly urgent twenty-first-century context. The work was acquired by The National Gallery of Art in January 2021. [Acquisition announcement, NGA object page, NYT article re: NGA reopening, Artdaily]

In 2021 The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University acquired Hecate, a tapestry previously included in a Myers solo exhibition at Fort Gansevoort New York. In June 2022, the tapestry was selected to feature in a group exhibition of mixed media works from the Nasher’s collection, Beyond the Surface: Collage, Mixed Media and Textile Works from the Collection. [Hecate on Nasher website, Beyond the Surface on Nasher website]

Myers was also commissioned to create the inaugural tapestry/flag for The Momentary, satellite space for the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, in June 2020. [post on The Momentary website]

In collaboration with textile workers local to Vietnam, Myers produced a series of smaller-scale embroideries, titled “I Am Not A Human Being” [included in LTMFWM, in Flags of No Nation exhibition, on Myers' website]. Each piece in the series is inspired by the lyrics of Lil Wayne, a musician that Myers and the embroiderers often listened to while working together.

Echo in the Bones
Myers’ sculpture series Echo in the Bones examines cross-cultural similarities and asks how these similarities can be utilized as a method of communication across borders. Inspired by the artist’s years living in Saigon, Myers conceived of a collection of brass instruments that would pay homage to a global tradition of jazz music: “I was living in Vietnam, and early in the morning you hear jazz music kind of wandering through the streets. [...] I ran outside and what I found was a brass band tradition that intersected with other brass band traditions like New Orleans jazz, but it’s used for funerals. So, in the morning you see all these funeral marches and jazz bands, and there were moments of recognition because the form is so indebted to African Americans. So, I began to make a series of uniforms and instruments for this funeral march that would go from Saigon to New Orleans.” [ – Myers in Autre] The instruments created for Echo in the Bones were later featured in a film by Ho Chi Minh City/Los Angeles based The Propeller Group called The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music and were displayed alongside it as part of a collaborative exhibition for the 2014 edition of Prospect New Orleans, “Notes for Now.” [P.3 Website, Chris' site, Pelican Bomb, Art21 video]

Select instruments from Echo in the Bones were also shown at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art as part of their Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes exhibition in 2016. [Art New England, ARTnews]

All Negro Freakshow
A series of objects, sculptures, and tapestries inspired by and exploring the lives of twenty black sideshow performers from the 19th century. Myers has explained his intent to return agency to these subjects, often miscast as victims in their own histories, saying “I think that we have to look at all of these stories and complicate them. To understand that nobody is that perfect victim that we want them to be.” [ – Myers in Autre]

Select sculptures shown in Drapetomania and Nobody is My Name. Some tapestries featured in LTMFWM, also at The Mistake Room Guadalajara, 2017

Caliban's Hands
[General info, Association for Public Art, Philly Voice, Contemporary& article about Monumental Tour], shown as part of the Monumental Tour in both Philadelphia and LA. Made in reference to Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a character often considered to be symbolic of European colonization.

Shadow Puppets/Fire in the Head
A collection of traditional Indonesian shadow puppets, or wayang kulit, made from painted buffalo hide and produced by local artists. Inspired by the diaries of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, Fire in the Head investigates the fluidity of identity and the tension between private and public perceptions of selfhood. [Autre, Website?, puppets as featured @ The Mistake Room, 2019]

Desert X/The Art of Taming Horses [Desert Sun, Palm Springs Life, KCET, Desert X site w/ video]
As part of Desert X 2021, Myers created a series of large-scale horse sculptures and accompanying tapestries that tell the story of two migrant ranchers creating a community in Palm Springs. A blend of fact and fiction based on forgotten histories of Mexican and African American cowboys, the public installation was fabricated by artists around the globe in Kenya, Denmark, and India. [Hyperallergic]

Collaboration and community are key components of Myers’ global, anti-colonial practice, in which he seeks to decenter the narrative of the sole artist and incorporate into the conversation both the artisans he works alongside and the cultures he works within. About his process, Myers has said that “this idea of the individual artist is a recent phenomenon. Saying, ‘This is from me but also this collective of sixty-year-old men who have been sewing for generations in Egypt,’ or ‘It’s with master shadow puppet makers in Indonesia,’ or ‘It’s with a publishing company,’ allowed me to take the violence of visibility away from my face and bring it into dialogue.” [ – Myers in BOMB] His work often mixes history with mythology, calling upon specific figures, traditions, and craftwork as framing for larger discussions about cross-cultural exchange, communication, and identity within a global context.

Fourth Class Relic
A memorial “chapel” dedicated to the legacy of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cells were cultured, without her knowledge or consent, to create the first immortalized human cell line in the 1950s. Featuring seven stained glass works, one a portrait of Lacks and others modeled after clones of Lacks’ cell line, and a filigreed prepared petri dish of Lacks’ cells with accompanying microscope for individual viewing. [page on his site]

As featured in The Hands of Strange Children
As part of his solo exhibition The Hands of Strange Children at James Cohan Gallery, Myers created a series of six stained glass works depicting revolutionary prophets: Wovoka, Nongqawuse, Nat Turner, Hong Xiuquan, Te Ua Haumene, and Alice Lawkena. By depicting each figure in a medium commonly relegated to Christian sacred spaces, Myers casts these prophets and their triumphs and failures alike as something to be venerated in the name of radical anti-colonial resistance. [TheGuide page discussing works on view in "THoSC", GalleriesNow, The Art Newspaper, ArtDaily, MutualArt]

Be Lost Well (Stay in the House All Day)
A newly commissioned piece on display at BAM for May/June 2022. Shown as part of their DanceAfrica Festival, titled Be Lost Well (Stay in the House All Day) [Info on BAM site]

Film
Am I Going Too Fast w/ Hank Willis Thomas [The Guardian, Sundance Institute Vimeo, Myers' site] is an experimental short film discussing international perceptions of poverty and the global aid industry as well as the discourse surrounding it, premiered as part of Sundance 2014. Written by Myers and co-directed by Myers and Hank Willis Thomas.