Ambrose Rhapsody Murray (b. 1996, Jacksonville, FL) calls on their Floridian and Carolinian roots through their artwork and practice. Depicting figures and historical images shrouded and layered in fabrics, their work pieces together history and myth with an intimate familiarity. Murray's work acts as a site of possibility, utilizing historical memory to think through the imaginative and mystical potential of the Black body. The artist's works shed light on the narratives and folklore that have become colloquial to Black history, especially Black Southern histories, such as the myth of the Flying Africans.
Toni Morrison found that, in the slave narratives she researched while writing Song of Solomon, when enslaved people were asked if they had ever heard of or witnessed flying Africans, one of the answers most frequently relayed was that they hadn't seen it happen themselves, but they knew a woman who had.
Morrison's emphasis was on the fact that none of these enslaved people denied flying Africans as a real phenomenon, but what about the woman who was said to be the witness? The myth of the flying African and other folktales used images of enslaved people adapting to the ocean and developing underwater nations or swimming back to Africa, providing respite through the ability to imagine life outside of a brutal and inhumane system. One of the most well-known examples is the story of Igbo Landing in St. Simons, Georgia. Historically, this event was marked as one of the largest mass suicides of enslaved people in history. Though in folklore or myth, orators have passed down the story of Igbo Landing, re-depicted as an instance where these enslaved people were so fearful and so tired that they walked into the water and returned home to Africa. While most myths and folktales were often created to teach lessons or provide small glimpses of hope by sharing stories of supernatural escape, at the root of these narratives is the orator: she, the woman who witnessed. These truths remain present contemporarily through the work of Black Southern artists who seek to uncover memories that seem to live within them.
In Murray's Intertwined, Underneath (2020), two figures are in a floating embrace. In Within Listening Distance of the Sea (2021), the sole figure in the work is surrounded by vessels and blue, organically shaped fabric pieces that mimic the ebb and flow of water. Ambrose Rhapsody Murray's artwork not only references the Afro-futurist myths of the supernatural and the ocean but also raises the idea that the Black body can hold onto a generational memory, especially the Black femme body. Works like Murray's are a reminder that Black histories leave an active and residual weighted presence while also giving a small glimpse into the memories of the Black woman who bore witness.
Dismembered, Unburied, Remember? (2022) is a work where the artist is searching for a way to re-remember, re-experience, and re-witness, sorting through the remnants of memory, questioning why the Black woman has been unable to be archived in all that she has experienced.
When Morrison discussed her thoughts about the myth and its nuncupative spread throughout Black communities, she said: "The one thing you say about a myth is that there's some truth in there, no matter how bizarre they seem." Does Ambrose Rhapsody Murray's artwork uncover this truth? Does it awaken the creativity that our ancestors had taken away from them, stifled, silenced, and forced to be altered, as Alice Walker mentions in her essay In Search of Our Mother's Gardens? In looking deeper into works like Dismembered, Unburied, Remember?, made with blankets sourced from North Carolina, a deeply historical place as well as Murray's ancestral homeland, we must piece together figures which seem to offer a vague familiarity or kinship. The piece suggests that the artist is asking the viewer to uncover, revise, or re-remember what may have evaded traditional archival capture; the woman who tells stories, the orator who shared what mythic experiences she had as a gift to be passed down.
The artist intentionally calls on thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, whose pathbreaking essay, "Venus in II Acts," walks the reader through the intimate bodily experience of the Black woman, the Black Venus, apart from her minimal and violent record in the archive. Hartman, through her critical fabulation method, utilizes a similar re-remembrance of a silenced truth or erased history. Murray takes this avenue of critical fabulation and the anti-blackness of the archive further, bringing in the use of narrative, storytelling, and Southern motifs and symbolism in their work to suggest an additional futurist or surrealist aspect.
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray is among a group of Southern artists who, through their work, call upon histories of tradition. Not only does their work bring to the forefront topics of myth, and the act of witnessing supernatural experiences—something that feels inherently Southern, in its act—but also highlights Southern Matriarchal histories like rootwork. Rootwork as a practice, similarly to the slave narrative, relies heavily on the act of oration and the passing down of symbolic ritual. This practice, similar to the woman who bore witness and tells the stories of escape, was borne out of a painful history. By continuing this practice by utilizing the body as a vessel of re-memory making, Murray's artworks highlight this nuanced aspect of history, often lost or unheard, especially outside of the American South.