Christopher Myers

[8][9] 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.

[11][12][13] He has received a BRIC Arts Media prize[14] and the American Library Association's Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award for his book illustration.

[1][32][10] 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.

[1][6] 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.

[9][38] Myers's tapestries notably mix dissonant modes of tradition—an intimate, quotidian and "warm, folksy art form"[10]—and critique, chronicling difficult narratives, involving, for example, Confederate monuments, slavery, police violence or climate crisis.

[37][8] 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.

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.

[4][6][10] 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.

[8][10] 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.

"[32][6][1] 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.

[29][32][6] In 2022, Myers created the stained-glass work Be Lost Well (Stay in the House All Day) for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which paid tribute to interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon.

[2][46][47] For his theater and dance performance Fire in the Head (2022, Crossing the Line), Myers worked with Indonesian master craftspeople to create shadow puppets that depicted inner conflicts revealed in the diaries of renowned dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.