Lights from the Garden

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

2023.60ab: An abstract sculpture (a) with plinth (b) titled, Lights from the Garden, by Jamal Cyrus. The sculpture, which is a tribute to Civil Rights leader Malcolm X and symbolizes his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights on February 21, 1965, features seven stacked bentwood chairs, pierced with fourteen stainless-steel rods. The seven chairs, which resemble the bentwood chairs on the Audubon Ballroom stage on the day of the assassination, are stacked in three rows to resemble an Islamic minbar; a three-step pulpit used by Imams to deliver sermons in mosques. All of the chairs are oriented in the same direction with the chairbacks creating the height of the sculpture and the seats creating the structure of the minbar’s steps. The sculpture has four chairs forming the bottom step, two chairs stacked above forming the middle step, and one chair above forming the top step.

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