Christopher Myers : Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me

For the Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, James Cohan is pleased to present Let The Mermaids Flirt with Me, 2022, a suite of stained glass paintings in lightboxes by Christopher Myers. Installed within a freestanding octagonal architectural structure, Let The Mermaids Flirt with Me, 2022, creates a chapel for contemplation of the illuminated compositions.

This monumental site-specific installation creates an atmospheric devotional space for Myer's deeply personal and poetic project. It is a visual exploration of the varied mythological, spiritual, and historical relationships between Black bodies, diaspora, and water.

That harrowing set of journeys across the water resonates through all of our cultural substance, the liminalities and hybridities, the displacements and disjunctures. The very hyphen that sails between the words African and American is a remnant of those ships from a few centuries ago.

 

-Christopher Myers

Each of these panels draws its imagery from mythologies, narratives, and iconographies associated with the African diaspora and the African-American experience. Myers pulls from a wide range of sources: from the stories of water deities like Mami Wata and North Carolina low-country cymbees to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the words of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that in the face of “the kind of physics,” the Bull Connors of the world wielded against our bodies and our spirits, we marshaled “the transphysics – we knew about…we had known water". Our songs, our myths, and our knowledges are rooted in opacities and liminalities, double-meanings and metaphors, the suggestive and the fluid. 

 

 – Christopher Myers

In his stained-glass paintings, Myers depicts individual figures as contemporary icons in a medium most commonly associated with sacred Christian architectural spaces.

Stained glass is a grand, old form associated with Europe that tells breathtaking stories of gods, love, war, and death, and asks big questions about the world around us. And yet, stained glass has other roots, global histories. It is a traditional form that holds all the stories of the world. 

 

- Christopher Myers

 

Across the illuminated stained glass works, Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me filters collective and individual histories through the transformative materiality of narrative to speak powerfully to the present.

IN CONVERSATION 

What do stories tell us? Artists Cauleen Smith and Christopher Myers use narratives to counter official histories and call for social justice. In this panel, they discuss the possibilities of storytelling; by referencing various myths from the African continent around water and by revisiting the words of activists such as abolitionist Sojourner Truth, both artists weave together past and future narratives in their practices.

Cauleen Smith, artist, New York

Christopher Myers, artist, New York

Moderator: Magalí Arriola, Director, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City