Nashville, Tenn.–A spirited conversation with Jamal Cyrus will explore the inference of memory and how history, cultural fragments, and archival material intersect with his practice as an artist.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
6:00–7:00 PM
Appleton Room, Jubilee Hall
Fisk University
Jamal Cyrus (b. 1973, Houston, TX) employs strategies of collage and assemblage to examine the shifting contours of Black cultural expression and resistance across the African diaspora. Through a materially rich and conceptually rigorous practice, Cyrus reactivates everyday objects and archival fragments, reconfiguring them into densely layered compositions that give voice to histories of identity, memory, and liberation.
Cyrus received his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He has received several prestigious awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023). In 2020, he was awarded the Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA. His mid-career survey, The End of My Beginning, opened at the Blaffer Art Museum in 2021 and later traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Mississippi Museum of Art. Cyrus was also a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates, active from 2002 to 2017.
This program is made possible with support from Getty through its “Visions of Black Life: Honoring the Johnson Publishing Company” initiative.
