Jamal Cyrus

artist

Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus's work examines the spaces between radical socio-political movements and untold histories, both real and imagined. For his first New York solo exhibition, Cyrus presents a new series of drawings, sculptures and videos that use Palmer Hayden's seminal social realist painting *The Janitor Who Paints* (1937) as a point of departure. Echoing this narrative scene, Cyrus creates an interrelated series of videos and drawings wherein the janitor's persona and his immediate tools become a metaphor for recovering the creative production of the overlooked and unnamed. Evocatively reworking the symbolic and political traditions in Hayden's painting, Cyrus explores slippages between the metaphysical and the ordinary, overlapping ideas of labor and creativity and the retelling of historical narratives.