HARLEM, NY.- The Studio Museum in Harlem inaugurated its new home with new commissions by artists Camille Norment and Christopher Myers.

Commissioned as a site-informed work for the Museum’s terrace staircase between the fifth and sixth floors, multimedia artist Camille Norment’s Untitled (heliotrope) (2025) is a sculptural and sound installation inspired by contemporary and historical migration.

Composed of handwoven brass wires and brass tubes—a material commonly used for musical instruments—this monumental sculpture features a chorus of voices that offer a sensory experience for visitors as they traverse between the Museum’s floors.

Sited in the Museum’s Education Workshop on the third floor, Christopher Myers’s Harlem Is a Myth (2025) is a wall-mounted metal-based installation depicting an intergenerational community of mythic beings gathered under a night sky. Myers features individuals who make up Harlem’s vibrant history—a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is transformed into a basketball-carrying centaur while jazz legends Thelonious Monk and Count Basie sprout butterfly and angel wings, respectively. Taking inspiration from what Myers describes as the “magic of Harlem” and “the endless possibility of the place,” Harlem Is a Myth invites audiences of all ages who enter the Education Workshop to imagine and learn in a creative and meaningful exchange.

Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “It is with great pleasure that we inaugurate our new building with two incredible commissions. In Camille Norment’s Untitled (heliotrope) we encounter the pipe organ and an accompanying choir, which both allude to Harlem's houses of worship. In Christopher Myers’s Harlem Is a Myth, which greets learners of all ages in our new Education Workshop, we meet fantastical depictions of figures who have been shaped by our surrounding community. Each work grounds visitors in the history of the neighborhood while gesturing to places—real and imagined—far beyond.”

Camille Norment: Untitled (heliotrope) is organized by former Senior Curatorial Assistant Habiba Hopson.

Christopher Myers: Harlem Is a Myth is organized by Assistant Curator Adria Gunter.

Camille Norment (b. 1970, Silver Spring, Maryland; lives and works in Oslo, Norway) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in sound but extends across drawing, installation, performance, sculpture, and video. In 1992 she received her BA in comparative literature and art history from the University of Michigan, and an MFA and an MA in interactive telecommunications from New York University in 1994 and 1998, respectively. From 1994 to 1995, she attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Norment’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Oslo Kunstforening, Norway; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago; and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. She has performed at institutions including the Munch Museum, Oslo, in 2021; the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, with Hamid Drake, in 2019; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, with Craig Taborn, in 2019. Her discography includes Toll (2011) and the soundtrack and special edition LP for the film The Haunted (2017/20).

Norment represented Norway at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and has participated in the Kochi-Muziris, Montreal, Lyon, and Thailand biennials. She currently serves as Prorector of Research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Christopher Myers (b. 1974, New York City; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) earned his BA in art-semiotics and American civilization with a focus on race and culture from Brown University in 1995 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studio Program in 1996. His recent solo exhibition, Each year this blood shall change and blossom: Christopher Myers on Myth and Migration, was on view at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, MI, from February 8 through April 27, 2025. Myers was featured in the 24th Sydney Biennale in 2024. His work has been exhibited throughout the

United States and internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Contrast Gallery, Shanghai; Goethe-Institut, Accra, Ghana; Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, Rwanda; San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Myers is currently working on a site-specific commission for the Percent for Art Commission at the Brooklyn Brownsville Public Library, expected to be completed in 2025. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Lucas Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Myers won a Caldecott Honor in 1998 for his illustrations in the book Harlem and a Coretta Scott King Award in 2016 for illustrating Firebird with Misty Copeland. Myers currently lives and works in Brooklyn.