As the first full-length monograph of Houston-based visual artist Jamal Cyrus, The End of My Beginning features an overview of Cyrus’s practice of cobbling modern artifacts that trace the evolution of Black identity as it migrates across the African diaspora, Middle Passage, Jazz Age, and Civil Rights movements from the 1960s to now.
Published to accompany Cyrus’s first career survey exhibition at the Blaffer, the catalogue includes materially diverse and conceptually charged textile-based pieces, assemblages, performances, installations, and works on paper produced in the past two decades, including his ongoing Pride Records installation series. Together, these multidisciplinary artworks demonstrate Cyrus’s commemoration, translation, and reactivation of sociopolitical struggles in African American history—forging a revised chronicle of histories, hybridity, and redemption.
Co-published by Inventory Press and Blaffer Art Museum in 2022
Hardcover | 136 pages | 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches