Organized by the Blaffer Art Museum, Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning is the first museum survey of Houston-based multidisciplinary artist Jamal Cyrus and spans almost two decades of the artist’s prodigious career. The exhibition provides an unparalleled opportunity to trace the trajectory of Cyrus’s practice. The End of My Beginning includes approximately 50 works in assemblage, textiles, sculpture, and installation by Cyrus, including mixed media works using an eclectic array of materials such as paper, graphite, papyrus, and denim.
Cyrus’s expansive practice explores the evolution of African American identity within Black political movements and the African diaspora. He is especially attuned to the cultural cross-pollination and hybridity that emerged from cross-border interactions in historical eras—from Ancient Egypt and the sixteenth–century transatlantic slave trade to the Jazz Age of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movements of the 1960s. His aesthetic combines an enduring interest in music and record shops with an expansive array of materials. In doing so, Cyrus’s vexing contemporary artifacts commemorate and question iconic figures and the understanding of historical events.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalog available in The Museum Store.
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About the Artist
Jamal Cyrus was born in 1973 in Houston, where he currently lives and works. He graduated with a BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. In 2005, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine; and in 2010, he was an artist–in-residence at Artpace San Antonio. Cyrus has participated in national and international exhibitions, including “Direct Message: Art, Language and Power” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019); “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016); “Arresting Patterns,” ArtSpace, New Haven, Connecticut, which traveled to the African American Museum, Philadelphia (2016); two 2013 exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem; and exhibitions at 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 addition, Cyrus’s work was featured in “Day for Night,” the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
As a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates, Cyrus has exhibited at the High (2008); Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2014); Project Row Houses, Houston (2014); the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. (2008); the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2008); the Menil Collection, Houston (2007); and Clementine Gallery, New York (2006).
Cyrus’s awards, grants, and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019); the BMW Art Journey award (2017); the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009); the Artadia Houston Award (2006); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2005). In 2020, he was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
