Christopher Myers

Myers is the son of well-known children's book author Walter Dean Myers (1937–2014).

Christopher Myers (born 1974) is an American interdisciplinary artist, author and illustrator of children's books, and playwright.

His wide-ranging practice—including tapestries, sculpture, stained glass lightboxes, theater and writing—is rooted in storytelling and artmaking as modes of transformation and cultural exchange.

He explores contemporary hybrid cultures and identities resulting from histories of migration (chosen and forced), globalization and colonization.

Critics have noted his work's fluid movement between disciplines, image and language, sociopolitical research and mythology, and diverse materials.

Shana Nys Dambrot of LA Weekly wrote, "Ideas about authorship, collaboration, cross-cultural pollination, intergenerational storytelling, mythology, literature and the oral histories of displaced communities all converge in his literal and metaphorical patchwork tableaux … [his] sharp, emotional and sometimes dark parables express it all in bright, jubilant patterns and saturated colors."

Myers's artwork belongs to the public collections of the National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

His work has been presented at venues including MoMA PS1, Kennedy Center, the Art Institute of Chicago and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

He has received a BRIC Arts Media prize and the American Library Association's Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award for his book illustration.

Myers is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Christopher Dean Myers was born in 1974 in Queens, New York.

They began collaborating in the mid-1990s, with Myers illustrating his father's books, and later, co-writing several with him.

He attended Brown University, earning a BA in Art-Semiotics and American Civilization in 1995, and participated in the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Studio Program in 1996.

He began to publish his own self-illustrated books with Black Cat in 1999, continuing through My Pen (2015).

In 2000, he began to exhibit his art.

He has appeared in surveys including "Greater New York" (MoMA PS1, 2005), the Prospect New Orleans Biennial (2014), Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana) (2017), and the 2021 Desert X Biennial.

He has had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Akron Art Museum, Fort Gansevoort, James Cohan Gallery, and the Blaffer Art Museum.

Since 2014, he has also collaborated on film, performance and theater works as a designer, writer and director, with artists such as Kaneza Schaal and Hank Willis Thomas.

Myers's art centers on how different elements—visual symbols, fabric patterns and paper fragments, words, narratives—are put together, rather than on the particulars of materials, objects or mediums.

This approach creates a common thread across his work, from the visual patchworks of collaged illustrations and appliqué tapestries to the conceptual juxtapositions of cultures, myths, stories and experiences in his books, plays and artwork.

Collaboration with communities and artisans (e.g., textile, glasswork, shadow puppet or instrument makers) around the world also plays a key role, enabling him to connect seemingly isolated geographies, histories, data points, generations and identities, while questioning the traditional narrative of the sole artist.

Tapestries have figured significantly in Myers's art.

The brightly colored, intricately patterned work draws upon influences including the innovative Quilts of Gee's Bend and simple cutouts of Henri Matisse, the figurative work of Jacob Lawrence, and global regional forms.

The mixed-media collaboration Echo in the Bones (2014, Prospect.3) examined grief rituals in Vietnam and New Orleans connected through the global tradition of jazz.

It combined photographs, a Saigon–New Orleans jazz funeral march and re-imagined, fantastical brass instruments and costumes created by Myers that were used in a film by the Vietnamese collective The Propeller Group.

In his Desert X installation, The Art of Taming Horses (2021), Myers collapsed the forgotten histories of Mexican and African-American cowboys in a fictional story of two ranchers told through vibrant, mythic tapestries and large-scale steel horse sculptures.

Both projects featured elements fabricated by artists and craftspeople from around the world, complicating the work with considerations of cultural exchange, authorship and identity.

In other sculptures, Myers has combined resonant objects and materials (e.g., figurines, ink, a face cage, microscopes) to evoke and transform trauma.

His exhibitions at The Mistake Room (2017, Guadalajara) included collaborations with Vietnamese embroiderers on images inspired by Lil Wayne rap songs and the "Vxllrncgnt" project—mural-like flags for imaginary nations made from 70-year-old Egyptian sails that were influenced by the colonial history of flags created by the Ghanaian Fante people.

Myers's tapestries notably mix dissonant modes of tradition—an intimate, quotidian and "warm, folksy art form" —and critique, chronicling difficult narratives, involving, for example, Confederate monuments, slavery, police violence or climate crisis.

Myers's titled his 2019 exhibition at Fort Gansevoort, "Drapetomania", referencing a supposed and debunked 19th-century pseudoscientific theory that posited enslaved Africans' impulse to escape bondage as a mental illness.

Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman wrote that its monumental tapestries "conceive a kind of emblematic space, part proclamatory banner, part illusionistic window to the world. The most affecting works visualize some sort of existential reckoning, a claiming of place, voice, liberty."

What Does It Mean To Matter (Community Autopsy) (2019) was a 14-foot wide group portrait of nine recent victims of police violence, each a silhouette in umber, crimson or ochre cloth modeled after coroners' autopsy sheets and embellished only with yellow and red shapes marking the bullet wounds that killed them.

In his 34-foot textile mural, Sarah Forbes Bonetta as Omoba Aina as Persephone (2021), Myers depicted the diasporic dislocations of a 19th-century Yoruba princess (Bonetta) who was orphaned and enslaved in a regional war, given to the British as a diplomatic gift, raised as Queen Victoria's ward, and finally married to a wealthy industrialist.

The tapestry's layered analogies connect her hybrid identity to colonial history and the Greek goddess Persephone, who was given away to Hades, god of the underworld.

Myers's sculpture similarly explores cross-cultural and trans-historical narratives and links.

Shackle and Light (2019) consisted of a thick metal collar encircling the neck of a featureless, carved wooden head with extending rods that housed dozens of periodically lit candles, transforming a symbol of oppression into a flickering chandelier signifying resistance.

Myers's shows "The Hands of Strange Children" (2022, James Cohan) and "of all creatures that can feel and think" (Blaffer Art Museum, 2023) featured stained glass lightboxes alongside tapestries and sculpture.

The stained glass works melded religious iconography (and a medium associated with sacred Christian spaces) with reconceived mythology to exalt historical anti-colonialist figures that Myers has called "failed prophets."

Nat Turner (2022) depicted the African-American insurgent in a moment of divine revelation inspired by the pose from Caravaggio's Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1600); in Nongqawuse (2022), the Xhosa prophet sits upon a horned bull in a restaging of the Greek myth of Zeus and Europa.