Each year this blood shall change and blossom: Christopher Myers on Myth and Migration

Myers’s works acknowledge the mythic proportion of individual migration stories and remind us of the significant risk and ambition of people who journey far from home in the hope of a better future. The exhibition will include new and never-before-seen work by the Brooklyn-based artist, including a series of new textiles inspired by Myers’s conversations with seasonal farmworkers here in West Michigan.

With support from local advocacy group, Migrant Legal Aid, Myers visited migrant housing sites throughout Kent and Ottawa counties to meet and record the stories of seasonal farmworkers. The 50,000+ migrant farmworkers in Michigan play a critical role in the state’s agricultural production, yet their stories largely remain untold. In these new works, Myers uses the myth of Persephone, the Greek goddess of agriculture, as a framework for sharing these experiences. Persephone’s journey to the underworld and return to the surface symbolized the changing of the seasons and cycle of growth and harvest, an apt metaphor for migrant workers whose travels mirror the seasons.

“I live in this world in which there are stories around me, there are stories that can change the world,” says Myers, ​“and my job is to find the form, and to usher these stories into the world.”

The exhibition will also mark the first time Myers’ sculptural series, They Will Never Remember the Boats We Came On, will be exhibited and will include his epic thirty-foot textile, Odyssey 4, on loan from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland.