← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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WNYC Announcer
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Dr. Horton Advertiser
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Mark your calendars for a week from today. On Tuesday, July 14, visitors to the central branch of the Brooklyn Library will be able to view stunning stained glass from New York native Christopher Meyer. They feature colorful portrayals of kids on bikes riding around New York City. The art from these windows is featured in Myers new children's book, Night Ride. It comes out in September. The exhibition also includes brand new tapestries from Myers that celebrate banned books, from George Orwell's Animal Farm to Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye. The exhibit Christopher Unbound opens at the Central branch of the Brooklyn Museum in exactly a week, when Christopher will be in conversation with fellow author Jacqueline Woodson. His book Night Ride will be published on September 29, and Christopher Myers is with me in studio. It's nice to meet you.
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Christopher Myers
Hey, nice to meet you too.
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Alison Stewart
I saw the public relations material about this and I said I need to know more. How did this come about?
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Christopher Myers
Well There's a few things going on at once. One is this book, which is an ode to quiet. I feel like the last number of years has been so loud. Everything is made in exclamation points. The outrage machine is clanking and clanging. And I've been thinking about the need, especially for children, for quiet moments, for moments of reflection. And this book is about that. You know, there's a thing about stained glass that it goes with an architecture of reflection. You know, you think about it in holy places, in synagogues and churches and these kinds of things. And I wanted to make the book itself a certain kind of architecture. Then again, you make huge stained glass windows. You want people to see the windows themselves. And so luckily, the brilliant curator at the Brooklyn Public Library, Cora, was like, hey, would you like to show them here? And that was an opportunity that was too good to miss.
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Alison Stewart
What is unique about the city when you're riding a bike? Because that's a big part of the book.
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Christopher Myers
Absolutely. I learned to ride a bike when I was 19 years old. And so there was always a sort of an outsiderness I had to. The culture of bike riding. But then when I finally learned to ride a bike, you realize that it sets you apart from the city as well as you're in the middle of, like, when you're walking, and I love to walk. I'm a New Yorker. I walk. You're in the middle of everything. You're part of the masses. But then when you're on a bike, you're just a little bit removed, but you're not in your own little box. You get to sort of see the city from a bird's eye view. And it's the best way to be in the city. It's the way to be in love with the city all over again. I find that being on my bicycle is still one of my favorite ways of being, especially with my child. We bike around, she's like 6 years old, and she sits on the back and she DJs our rides. And there's nothing better.
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Alison Stewart
The stained glass windows, how did they come into being? How did you make them? How did you design them? Tell us about that.
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Christopher Myers
So I've been making stained glass in my fine arts life for a number of years, and then I show it in museums and in galleries.
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Alison Stewart
Galleries all over the city.
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Christopher Myers
Right. And I love the audience of the fine arts world, but even more so, I love the audience of children. And I think so much about bringing my fine arts life to. To my book life. And I've been Making books since I was about 19. So this is kind of a meeting of the worlds. I make theater, I make books, I make fine arts. And in this moment, in this one book, I get to sort of do it all. You know, the book itself is a stage across which children fly on their bikes and experience the city and experience all of the moments of quiet that I find in the city. And, you know, when people are transplants to New York, they often ask, like, where do you find quiet? And for those of us who are New Yorkers, we know that quiet is not something that you find necessarily outside you. It's not like it's on 39th and 7th. That's where quiet lives.
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Alison Stewart
It's not quiet at 39th and 7th.
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Christopher Myers
Exactly. Exactly. It's never been quiet there, never been quiet there. But quiet is a thing that we find in ourselves, and we find it in all of the corners of the city that we enjoy.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is artist Christopher Myers. We're talking about his forthcoming exhibition at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Christopher Myers, Unbound. The exhibit also featured stained glass art from his upcoming children's book. Night Ride, will be published on September 29th. You also, aside from everything else you make, you work in tapestries and textiles.
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Christopher Myers
So I've been making quilts for about 15 years. I love forms of storytelling that aren't necessarily highfalutin, classy, you know, oil paintings and this sorts of thing, digital photography. I like things that show the hand. And so my work is always about finding these older forms. Stained glass, quilts, various kinds of sculpture, and telling stories that are important to me. And that's part of what the gift of this exhibit has been, is that it's a space that will unfold over time. We're starting in next week, and we're going to keep going all the way through Banned Books Week in October. And at that point, we'll have sort of like a culmination of all the kinds of work that I am doing and that we are thinking about as a community.
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Alison Stewart
So when you're working with stained glass or working with tapestries, what's the same about working with these materials and what's different?
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Christopher Myers
The thing that I'm very passionate about is for young people to understand that nothing is done alone. We're on the radio right now. We hear with engineers. We're here with each other. We have. When you make a book, producers and everything.
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Alison Stewart
Yes.
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Christopher Myers
When you're making a book, you have an editor like Namrata Chaturpathi, or a designer like Jasmine Ribeiro. And you put that together. You know, a book is a collaboration. The tapestries are collaboration. I work with lots of fabric workers in Central Egypt to tell a story. And really, that's where I keep coming back to, is that this is all a collaboration, and it ends when it. When you view it, when the last collaborator is the person who gets to, like, share the work, who gets to be the light shining through the stained glass window. That is my goal, is to extend that collaboration as wide as I can.
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Alison Stewart
Going off on a little bit of a tangent. The first time one of your stained glass windows was shown and you saw the light go through it, what went through your mind?
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Christopher Myers
I thought to myself, I'm touching the same material that people have touched for centuries, and I'm getting to tell my own story through that material. And that's really the gift of it. You know, again, this is all a collaboration. This is always a process, like theater, like bookmaking. Like everything we do, we are collaborating with each other. No book that I make is finished until it's in the hands of a reader. No glass that I make is finished until someone sees it. You know, it almost sounds like one of those, like, Zen koans, the idea of, like, what's a stained glass window in a dark room?
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Alison Stewart
You know, have you ever overheard someone looking at one of your pieces of art, your pieces of stained glass? And what did they say?
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Christopher Myers
I mean, so often what you hear is silence. People get really reverent and really quiet around stained glass. When these tapestries go up, you'll see that there's a kind of a quiet around monumental tapestries. And I love to provide these moments of quiet. I think, again, this world right now is so loud, they got people fighting on the White House lawn, you know, and we need to remember that quiet also has a great power, that it's not about how many exclamation points you can put or how many reposts you can find. There are moments of quiet, and we need to celebrate those. This is what this book does.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting because the book doesn't have any words. Is that true?
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Christopher Myers
Absolutely. It's a wordless picture book. It's my first wordless picture book. I've done about 25 books so far, and it's the first time I've ever been brave enough to try and do something that didn't have words.
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Alison Stewart
Was that hard?
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Christopher Myers
Absolutely. I kept saying to my editor, I was like, maybe I should just do, like, a poem or maybe just a few spare words on the edge of the page. And luckily, wiser heads prevailed. And we get to have this sort of moment, this journey in a book.
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Alison Stewart
In the book. What part of New York did you know you had to include on the bike ride?
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Christopher Myers
I had to include all of the places that are central and holy to me. So there's a Studio Museum in Harlem, where I have an installation right now. And the Studio Museum has always been a home for me and so many black artists. There's The Guggenheim. There's St. John the Divine. There's Central park, there's Times Square. Even Times Square. Even can be quiet. If you find the right moment in the middle of the night, as the light is pouring down, you're like, this is a strange day for night moment. But it is quiet. Chinatown, of course, we think about. Earlier you were talking about mahjong. You think about this idea of what does it look like when. When we have all of our cultures meeting and how beautiful that can be. And the Brooklyn Bridge. I live in Brooklyn, and so, you know, Brooklyn is always going to be part of it.
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Alison Stewart
As we mentioned, part of the installation you've created Tapestry inspired by characters from banned books. Why did you want to highlight certain characters?
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Christopher Myers
I think that the practice of banning books is. Is interesting because on one hand, you have books which are these inviting entities. Books don't jump into your lap and start screaming at you. Books invite you to participate in them. And on the other hand, you have all of these voices who are trying to be so loud, all of these voices who will scour a library shelf for a book that they haven't read so that they can hold it up and they can have a megaphone. And again, I believe in quiet. I believe in the power of quiet. And I think that so often when you ban a book, you give it more power. There's an understanding that there's important information in this book, that this is the cultural signaling that people are trying to do by banning books often has the opposite effect. And I'm interested in celebrating those moments that we give ourselves over to a book. I'm interested in celebrating all of the books that have knowledge that I'm supposed to not have. You know, it was just recently Juneteenth, and we talk about the idea of, like, what do we do on Juneteenth? And I always say I like to do a lot of the things that it was illegal for me to do 200 years ago. Reading is one of those things. And there is no book that I ever want to ban in that. In that spirit.
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Alison Stewart
What did libraries mean to you as a little kid growing up in New York?
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Christopher Myers
Oh, well, my dad was a writer, Walter Dean Myers, and he. I lived in libraries through him. He was on the library board at some point. And libraries are those holy places. There's a spread in the book about the New York Public Library because I think about where are the places that give me strength, where are the places that give me quiet? Libraries are always going to be there for us in that way, if we are lucky.
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Alison Stewart
What do you hope people who spend some time with the exhibit think about or talk about as they take in
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WNYC Announcer
your art at the Brooklyn Public Library?
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Christopher Myers
I want to remind us how holy these places are. You know, I think one of the things that we have lost as a culture is a sense of what is sacred, you know, where everything can be a joke or everything can be written off as well. You know, I meant. I didn't mean what I was saying. I believe that language is sacred. I believe that books are sacred. I believe that libraries are the sum total of who we are as humanity. And I want to kind of give those moments, those moments of quiet, real power.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the exhibition is Christopher Meyer's Unbound. It'll be at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library that starts next week, July 14, as well as his book Night Ride, which will be published on September 29th.
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WNYC Announcer
You'll be in conversation with Jackie Woodson next week.
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Christopher Myers
Yes, yes, I will. And the exhibition will unfold over the next few months.
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Alison Stewart
That sounds great, Christopher.
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WNYC Announcer
Thank you for spending time with us.
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Christopher Myers
Thank you so much, Hals.
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Alison Stewart
Coming up, we'll hear from musicians who rock the 1990s. Singer, songwriter Sarah McLachlan, bassist Melissa Afdemar and two members from the group the Lunatics. That's next after the news. This is all of it.
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Dr. Horton Advertiser
Now is your time to get into a new Dr. Horton home by taking advantage of its national red tag sales event. This Friday, July 10th through Sunday, August 2nd. Stop by any of its participating communities and find select red tag homes at Incredible Pricing. So whether you're buying your first home or looking for an upgrade, you don't want to miss the red tag sales event. Starting this Friday, discover the Dr. Horton Difference. Visit drhorton.com Dr. Horton, America's Builder and equal housing opportunity builder.