After years of focusing on an array of other fine art projects, Caldecott Honor artist Christopher Myers returns to publishing with Night Ride, a wordless picture book featuring rich stained-glass imagery that celebrates childhood, freedom, imagination, and New York City.
The September 29 release from Penguin’s Kokila imprint follows a group of kids one night as they joyfully bicycle through the city they call home, riding from Harlem through Manhattan and over the Brooklyn Bridge, which shines tall above them on the book’s cover, seen here in an early look.
“It’s been a minute since I’ve done a book for children,” Myers told PW. He’s kept plenty busy in the meantime, creating distinctive works across disciplines including film, opera, sculpture, and textiles and seeing them displayed in such venues as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim in Manhattan, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He’s also creative director of the Random House Children’s Books imprint Make Me a World, which he founded as a home for titles by other artists and storytellers. But what brought him back to the medium he calls his “first love” was the desire to express some of his most pressing thoughts in an innovative way.
“One of the things that’s been stressing me out lately is the question, ‘What’s sacred, what is worthy of taking care of and being careful with?’ ” Myers said. “I feel like in our day and age the idea of what is sacred has been lost in either the quick fix of social media, or the kind of ostentation and over-the-top visibility of every other kind of thing in the world.” With that in mind, he said, “I wanted to do a book about a few things that are sacred to me.” At the top of that list is childhood. “I have a six-year-old daughter and watching her thrive and explore and start to feel her independence is a moment I’m in awe of,” he said.
Myers also described the sense of freedom and exploration, and learning to love the places you’re in as sacred to him. “I wanted to make a book about these ideas that was almost as quiet as a church,” he said. “I didn’t think I could quite express it in words. I could express it, though, in images, and I felt it was particularly appropriate to think about it in terms of stained glass, which is a visual language we use for the sacred.”
Though Myers has been working in stained glass for the past six or seven years (he currently has pieces featured in a show at the Portland Art Museum), he had never translated it to the page before, just as he had never done a wordless book. “I was a little afraid at first,” he said. “I can depend on words to sort of fill in the blanks, but to build a wordless book took some courage.” It also took developing a whole new technique, he explained, “to do 20-something separate four-foot by six-foot windows, and to be able to build a consistent language across that many windows.”
Creating in Community
Myers credits the patience and insight of his collaborators with helping him get Night Ride to the finish line: Kokila’s founder, president, and publisher Namrata Tripathi, who edited the book; senior art director/designer Jasmin Rubero; and the family of glass makers in Guadalajara, Mexico he works with to make his stained glass. breaks down the intricate artwork process in an author’s note at the end of the book, detailing the journey from pencil sketch to framed stained-glass image. The finished windows then traveled from Mexico back to Myers in New York, where they were illuminated and photographed to create the final illustrations.
When considering the perfect image for the book’s cover, he said, “I wanted something warm and inviting that talked about community, city, and architecture, and something that focused on the kids.” He added, “I want the cover and the book itself to have its own architecture and be the kind of holy place that a young person can visit and ask themselves some questions about where they are and where they want to be.”
Myers is excited to see Night Ride in the world and reaching readers after its long journey to publication. “No book, no piece of art, happens alone,” he said. “There’s always the idea of your first audience; in this case, it’s Namrata and Jasmin. And then it ends with the young people who get the book. That’s what makes the book complete. All of these stained-glass windows are just glass until light passes through them, and that light is the young people who will read the book.”
The images from Night Ride will likely “have other kinds of lives,” Myers said. “I brought as much as I could to bear in this work. And for years I’ve talked about the idea that I think children’s book illustration should be considered amongst the fine arts,” he added. “As somebody who is straddling those worlds, I want to be clear that all of the work, for me, is at the same level. I am a person who thinks about how to tell stories visually, and that takes many forms.”
This latest project also has Myers considering making other books. “With the partners I have at Kokila, it’s exciting for me to think about how to bring some of my other fine arts practices into the kids’ book space,” he said. For starters, he said, “I’m thinking about bringing some of my quilting traditions into the book world.” As a recent example, his 30-foot by 10-foot quilt about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, titled “The Grim Work of Death,” was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture last year.
Night Ride by Christopher Myers. Kokila, $19.99 Sept. 29; ISBN 979-8-217-23846-0
