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By Javacia Harris Bowser | The Birmingham Times
Vulcan. Steel workers. Protests. These elements are undeniably linked to Birmingham’s past and present, and all three inspired new artwork recently unveiled at the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA).
Created specifically for the BMA, the new installation, The Slow Can Beat the Quick, by New York-based artist and writer Christopher Myers transforms the museum’s lobby with a massive textile piece inspired by Birmingham’s histories of steel, labor, and land.
The Wall to Wall series invites artists to activate the BMA’s lobby with original, site-specific installations inspired by the city. Myers’ piece is the fifth installment of the series and the first textile installation commissioned for Wall to Wall.
“Christopher Myers demonstrates how textiles can hold history, memory, and identity, and his work transforms the Museum’s main lobby into a space that is monumental but also intimate, and deeply connected to Birmingham’s past and present,” said Jade Powers, Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art.
Christopher Myers’ piece is the fifth installment of the Wall to Wall series. (Provided)Myers recently visited Birmingham to celebrate the opening of the installation, which will be on display through July 11, 2027. Though he is a New York native, Myers has long been intrigued by Birmingham’s history.
“I think that Birmingham is one of the epicenters of this history of labor that is central to the history of the United States,” Myers told the Birmingham Times. “I was very excited when I was invited to think about work for here.”
Rooted in storytelling, Myers’s multidisciplinary practice draws on history and mythology and examines cultural collisions through textiles, sculpture, performance, and film.
For his BMA installation, Myers explores the history and importance of labor in Birmingham and beyond.
“Everything that we love in the world, everything that we enjoy, that we partake in, is the product of labor, and it’s important for us to remember that labor and to remember all the ways that our lives are touched by thousands and thousands of hands that support us,” Myers said. “If you’re wearing clothing, if you are in a building, if you are driving a car, if you’re walking down a paved road, you are in this continuity of labor.”
And Myers believes the Birmingham area is at the center of this story.
“Birmingham is a fascinating place in terms of its history and how it has ties to the longest histories of the United States,” he said. “In Bessemer, where you have a cotton plantation that gets sold to the steel corporations, and then the steel corporations sell that land to Amazon, and there is this continuity of labor and of land here … and it is worth understanding that we are connected to our past in that way.”
In his work for the BMA, Myers includes images inspired by an old photograph of steel workers relaxing during their break. Another image is drawn from a portrait of a formerly enslaved woman. One section of the piece acknowledges the Amazon fulfillment center workers in Bessemer fighting to unionize.
The title of the piece — The Slow Can Beat the Quick — is inspired by Vulcan.
In his work for the BMA, Christopher Myers includes images inspired by an old photograph of steel workers relaxing during their break. (Birmingham Museum of Art)“This is a line from the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey, and in The Odyssey, they mention the god Hephaestus, the Vulcan, who stands looming over Birmingham,” Myers explained.
In the myth, Hephaestus has a physical deformity, yet he is still a god who can make anything from birds to bronze to lightning bolts.
“I think that has a resonance for us,” Myers said. “There’s this understanding that we may have our problems, we may have our challenges, but we will still triumph.”
To learn more about this and other exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, visit www.artsbma.org.
The title of the piece — The Slow Can Beat the Quick — is inspired by Vulcan. (Birmingham Museum of Art)
