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About the Artwork
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The 2008-2009 Negro Ensemble Company season artwork for each play is designed by award-winning fine artist and illustrator Christopher Myers. In the following note, Myers explains the inspiration and vision behind his design.
There are really only a handful of stories, the same bones lie at the centers of Oedipus at Colonus and Death of a Salesman, for example. The rest is the skin in which we wrap the stories. Which is not to say that skin isn't important, in fact it may be more important than the bones. Skin is the part we fall in love with, we caress, we embrace, we nurture. Skin brings immediacy and specificity. A play written on a page is just a skeleton until someone performs it and gives it skin. Nightly, a theater company resurrects the dry bones of a well-written play, wraps them in flesh and laughter and tears.
I am excited to have provided artwork for the latest resurrections of Signature Theatre Company. The Negro Ensemble Company has, for years, forged new ground in making theatre with solid bones and real skin. These plays have written into their skeletons the big questions about happiness, community, and responsibility, and written into their flesh is the African-American experience. Classical bones and Black Skin.
The artwork I created reflects that juxtaposition. The silhouette of fillet binders of ancient Rome blends with the sinews of a young gangster on 135th Street. A neo-classical woman caught in white marble turns her head with the poise of a Newark grandmother. A steel-eyed brother looks back on his life and it seems to stretch through the bodies of two women, to the time of Oedipus. There is money and freedom and green grass and gunplay. All of these are part of the skin and bones that the Negro Ensemble Company and Signature Theatre Company have worked so hard to bring to life.
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