Jamal Cyrus's piece Nuwaubic Connections (2020) is a translation from paperwork and posters and advertisements called "The Kings of Africa", a massive corporation catering to and depict African pride leading to Jamal redistributing that text. These Budweiser advertisements were marketed towards African Americans and the company commissioned African American artists to make the artwork for the advertisements as a nod to the history and culture. Because these products were found everywhere, from grocery stores to bodegas from the most marginalized neighborhoods and otherwise, the installation shows the transmission of cultural capitalism. Jamal quilted the posters and translated them into a new form by stitching them together with prayer talismans. He had it photographed at extremely high resolution for the installation. It references the African diaspora in relation to cultural capitalism and capitalism's relationship to the life cycle of a city (the site of the exhibit was a former Budweiser warehouse which has since transformed into something else, an unintentional coincidence but bears meaning nonetheless).
African Cosmologies, Public Life: Distance and Diaspora was an exploration of the interconnectedness of global African diaspora through works depicting shared geospecific traditions, cultures, communities, and sociopolitical issues. Public Life was a series of outdoor art exhibitions, presented on street-facing building facades in the Arts District of Houston. It was composed of large-scale vinyl photos from global and Texas artists of the African diaspora. The exhibition featured works by Jamal Cyrus, Eric Gyamfi, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Aida Silvestri and held themes of social activism, visibility, and solidarity.
The Public Life exhibition series examined the interwovenness of time, publicness, and community, and how these relatively mundane and taken for granted concepts have been redefined by recent events such as the coronavirus pandemic, political unrest, and civil rights movements across the world. Cyrus, Gyamfi, Saro-Wiwa, and Silvestri document snapshots and stories of tenacity in these trying times, steadfastness against oppressive ideology, and showcase the history of politicization of the personal (given the highly politicized identity of the African diaspora). The exhibition questioned the role of the public and what publicness means in 2020 and 2021.
I found the exhibit to be very powerful. Giant murals, splashed across streetside building walls so that all of the people who drove or walked by the Arts District in Houston could see it. And the themes exploring the barrage of news about the pandemic alongside news about systemic racism and the brutalization of Black lives was powerful -- the large-scale photos similarly drew the attention of the public just as the televised and covered news regarding Black pain. Public Life reflects cultural, political, and social ideas, more specifically civil rights and how the media circulates and how these dynamics have shifted and changed over the course of the pandemic and are reflective of current times. The exhibit grounds people on an international level with the fundamental shared experience of quarantine. I think these themes of publicness, time, and community and the exploration of these themes in relation to social justice make photography and new media the perfect medium for this series. Photography is accessible, photography captures a still moment in time -- a photo captures a snapshot of reality. New media is reflective of modern day virality and that in itself bears relation to the pandemic.
