Christopher Myers (born 1974) is an American interdisciplinary artist, author and illustrator of children's books, and playwright.^[1][2][3] His wide-ranging practice—including tapestries, sculpture, stained glass lightboxes, theater and writing—is rooted in storytelling and artmaking as modes of transformation and cultural exchange.^[4][5] He explores contemporary hybrid cultures and identities resulting from histories of migration (chosen and forced), globalization and colonization.^[1][6][7] Critics have noted his work's fluid movement between disciplines, image and language, sociopolitical research and mythology, and diverse materials.^[8][9] Shana Nys Dambrot of LA Weekly wrote, "Ideas about authorship, collaboration, cross-cultural pollination, intergenerational storytelling, mythology, literature and the oral histories of displaced communities all converge in his literal and metaphorical patchwork tableaux … [his] sharp, emotional and sometimes dark parables express it all in bright, jubilant patterns and saturated colors."^[10]

Myers's artwork belongs to the public collections of the National Gallery of Art,^[11] Brooklyn Museum,^[12] National Museum of African American History and Culture,^[13] and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,^[14] among others. His work has been presented at venues including MoMA PS1, Kennedy Center, the Art Institute of Chicago and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.^[15][16][17] He has received a BRIC Arts Media prize^[18] and the American Library Association's Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award for his book illustration.^[19][20] Myers is based in Brooklyn, New York.^[2][11]

Christopher Dean Myers was born in 1974 in Queens, New York.^[21] He attended Brown University, earning a BA in Art-Semiotics and American Civilization in 1995, and participated in the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Studio Program in 1996.^[20]

Myers is the son of well-known children's book author Walter Dean Myers (1937–2014).^[22][23] They began collaborating in the mid-1990s, with Myers illustrating his father's books, and later, co-writing several with him.^[22][24] He began to publish his own self-illustrated books with Black Cat in 1999, continuing through My Pen (2015).^[25][26][3] In 2000, he began to exhibit his art. He has appeared in surveys including "Greater New York" (MoMA PS1, 2005), the Prospect New Orleans Biennial (2014), Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana) (2017), and the 2021 Desert X Biennial.^{[7][27][28][29]} He has had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem,^[30] the Akron Art Museum,^[31] Fort Gansevoort,^[4] James Cohan Gallery,^[32] and the Blaffer Art Museum.^[6] Since 2014, he has also collaborated on film, performance and theater works as a designer, writer and director, with artists such as Kaneza Schaal and Hank Willis Thomas.^[33][2][34]

Myers's art centers on how different elements—visual symbols, fabric patterns and paper fragments, words, narratives—are put together, rather than on the particulars of materials, objects or mediums.^[1][35][10] This approach creates a common thread across his work, from the visual patchworks of collaged illustrations and appliqué tapestries to the conceptual juxtapositions of cultures, myths, stories and experiences in his books, plays and artwork.^[1][6] Collaboration with communities and artisans (e.g., textile, glasswork, shadow puppet or instrument makers) around the world also plays a key role, enabling him to connect seemingly isolated geographies, histories, data points, generations and identities, while questioning the traditional narrative of the sole artist.^{[36][10][37][38]}

Myers has collaborated on works in theater, dance, opera and film. His work with Kaneza Schaal includes Go/Forth (2016, Performance Space New York), a work on mourning written by Schaal and designed by Myers;^[33] Jack & (2018, Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Cartography (2019, Kennedy Center), written and designed by Myers and directed by Schaal;^[47][2] and Schaal's KLII (2022, Walker Art Center), which Myers designed and co-directed.^[48] Jack & examined incarceration and re-entry into society through a single character and was presented with Myers's accompanying video installation, The Cotillion.^[47] Cartography emerged from their work with migrant children around the world and took a nonlinear look at the widespread, shared experience of migration.^[2][49][50]

For his theater and dance performance Fire in the Head (2022, Crossing the Line), Myers worked with Indonesian master craftspeople to create shadow puppets that depicted inner conflicts revealed in the diaries of renowned dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.^[51] He worked with artist Hank Willis Thomas on Am I Going Too Fast? (2014, Sundance), an experimental short film about poverty, the global aid industry and the rapid rise of technology in Kenya.^[34][7] Myers was also the production designer for the opera Omar (2022, Spoleto Festival, LA Opera) by composers Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, about 19th-century Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said.^[52][53]

Myer's work as an illustrator and author have been recognized by the American Library Association (ALA) and Cooperative Children’s Book Center.^[54][55] He received a Caldecott Honor for illustration for Harlem (1998) and a Coretta Scott King Honor for Jazz (2007), both written by his father, Walter Dean Myers.^[19][54][56] He also received Coretta Scott King Honors for illustration for two of his own books, Black Cat (2000) and H.O.R.S.E. (2013).^[57][26][54] In 2014, his illustration for Firebird by Misty Copeland won a Coretta Scott King Award.^[20][58]

Myers's illustration has combined painting, photography and collage.^[16] In a 2000 New York Times review of Myers's book, Wings, Michael Emberley wrote that over the course of several books, his work evolved from dense oil on cut-paper images to heavily worked photos to seemingly hasty cut-paper pieces with "a fresh, urban look, bringing to mind the great collage artist Romare Bearden" or the "confidence and brashness of a hip young Matisse."^[25] Patricia J. Williams wrote of the collection, Lies and Other Tall Tales (2005): Myers's "collages of paper and fabric, are visual plays and puns in their own right. If the tales Hurston collected are wry and absurd, Myers's depictions give that absurdity a gorgeously kinetic vivacity beyond words."^[59]

Myers has also contributed essays about uneven racial representation in children's book publishing and the public violence experienced by youth of color to The New York Times^[60] and The Horn Book Magazine.^[61][62] In 2016, he founded an imprint, Make Me a World, with Random House Children’s Books, in part to address the lack of racial and cultural diversity in children’s publishing.^[63][64]

Myers's published work as an illustrator includes:

• The Shadow of the Red Moon (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Scholastic Press, 1995
• Harlem: A Poem (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Scholastic Press, 1997
• Monster (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: HarperCollins, 1999
• Blues Journey (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Holiday House, 2001
• A Time to Love: Stories from the Old Testament, (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Scholastic Press, 2003
• Autobiography of My Dead Brother (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: HarperCollins, 2005
• Love: Selected Poems (by E. E. Cummings), New York: Hyperion Books, 2005
• Jazz (by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Holiday House, 2006
• Looking Like Me (written by Walter Dean Myers), New York: Egmont USA, 2009
• Firebird (by Misty Copeland), New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2014
• Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, A Young Artist in Harlem (by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts), New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015
• Into the Uncut Grass (by Trevor Noah), New York: Penguin Random House, 2023^[65]

Myers's published work as an author and illustrator include:

• Black Cat, New York: Scholastic Press, 1999
• Wings, New York: Scholastic Press, 2000
• Fly!, New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books, 2001
• Lies and Other Tall Tales (stories collected by Zora Neale Hurston, adapted by Myers), New York: HarperCollins, 2005
• Jabberwocky (poem by Lewis Carroll, reinterpreted by Myers), New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books, 2007
• We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart (co-written with Walter Dean Myers), New York: HarperCollins, 2011
• H.O.R.S.E.: A Game of Basketball and Imagination, New York: Egmont USA, 2012
• My Pen, New York: Disney Hyperion Books, 2015

Myers's art belongs to the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum,^[66] Brooklyn Museum,^[12] Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mead Art Museum,^[67] Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,^[14] Nasher Museum of Art,^[21] National Gallery of Art,^[36] National Museum of African American History and Culture,^[13] Pérez Art Museum Miami,^[68] Rubell Museum,^[69] The Studio Museum in Harlem,^[70] and US Department of State,^[71] among others.

He has received a BRIC Arts Media prize (2019),^[18] an Art for Justice Fund grant (2018),^[72] and an artist residency at San Art Laboratory (2013, Vietnam).^[73] In 2018, he created the commissioned billboard Mayflowers (2018, Maine) as part of the For Freedoms "50 State Initiative" promoting political participation,^[74] and in 2020 created My Body is a Burning House, a billboard for Walls for a Cause NYC.^[75][76]