Eroding Witness 7b

Artist Jamal Cyrus was an undergraduate in college at the University of Houston when he first learned about Carl Hampton, a black activist who was shot by the Houston Police in 1970. Fascinated by his hometown’s little-known Civil Rights Movement, Cyrus has characterized Hampton’s assassination as “a trauma that the next generation wanted to forget.” After closely researching this largely forgotten event, Cyrus created "Eroding Witness," laser-cut drawings that examine the four dramatically divergent accounts of Hampton’s murder in local newspapers of the time: the Houston Chronicle, Houston Post, The Voice of Hope, and the Houston Forward Times. Cyrus’s decision to laser-cut the newspaper text enacts a removal that reinforces the violence of Hampton’s death and his absence from history. His choice of papyrus, an early writing material associated with ancient Egypt, suggests the timeless nature of this violence. By comparing the different accounts and treatment of this event, "Eroding Witness" reminds us that our understanding of the present and past is inevitably shaped by the way the media frames the events it reports through the words and images it deploys. The title underlines the way one day’s headlines gradually recede from consciousness into collective amnesia. These drawings offer an attempt to serve as a belated witness to this event while capturing the messy complexity and instability of history and of language itself.