image courtesy of the artist
Birdcap, Peace Returns: The Death of Achilles, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist.
Homer’s Iliad begins with a promise of anger, of Achilles’ wrath that would bring about the ruin of Troy. “Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,” goes the epic. “Many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.”
It’s a story driven by men’s pride, cloaked as heroism, yet leading only to bloodshed and tragedy. Or, as artist Michael “Birdcap” Roy puts it, “All these men were doing all these sort of idiotic things under the guise to be heroic.”
But Birdcap doesn’t say this to belittle these characters, but instead to remark on their humanity that might go unnoticed under the prestige of classical literature. “I just found something very comforting or familiar in these men,” he says. “It reminded me of growing up in the deep South and what it means to be a man in Mississippi and how sometimes cleverness and wit are almost looked down upon. Like, your ability to be stoic within pain is more exceptional than your ability to avoid pain. So you stay during a hurricane or you work a hard job. You don’t try to become like a crafty lawyer. … Those characters reminded me of my family and me.”
Birdcap’s current show at Crosstown Arts plays with this idea. Titled “Iliumpta,” the exhibition is a retelling of Homer’s poem, set in the southernmost bayous of Mississippi in the fictitious county of Iliumpta. “It’s based on the word Ilium, which is the Latinized version of Troy, and umpta is sort of like a false noise to make it sound like a Mississippi county,” Birdcap says. “I thought it was a good way to have an introspective show that talked about myself but using this sort of universal reference.”
He writes in his artist statement, “The men in these works shout from a nihilistic void, and in their attempts to be heroic, they, like the ancients before them, choose death over happiness, a closed ear before sound advice, and doom before an apology.”
This is Birdcap’s first solo show in Memphis. While he is known for his large-scale murals seen throughout the city and around the world, Birdcap says, “This is my first chance to have a big sort of homecoming show.”
image courtesy of the artist
Birdcap, Icarus (Relic), stone on panel. Courtesy the artist.
Before he was Birdcap, Michael Roy grew up in Escatawpa, Mississippi, a town of some 3,000 people near the Gulf Coast. “I’m 36 now,” he says. “I’m old enough to know I can’t be from anywhere else. There was a time when I was young, where I was like, if I try, I can be from somewhere else. And it’s like, no, your memories are there and they’re a part of you, they’re a part of your myth.”
Since he can remember, Birdcap was always drawing. In 2003, he attended the Mississippi School of the Arts the first year it opened in Brookhaven, just south of the state capital. “I had a terrible portfolio — I drew Ninja Turtles on computer paper,” he says, “but they put the bug in me and I determined that’s what I wanted to do. And that’s how I came to Memphis, going to the now-defunct Memphis College of Arts. I majored in painting and minored in art history.”
“I like cartoons because when I was young, I would try to make dramatic work about my feelings or politics or whatever, but I would visualize it in this dramatic way. And I think it had the opposite effect where people didn’t really want to pay attention to it. But I think cartoons are very safe and we all have this child-like relationship with them, and so it allows you to put these complicated or harder messages in but still be listened to.” — Birdcap
The year he began attending MCA was also the same year he painted his first mural. It was 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown. He created a tribute in Escatawpa to the lives lost and the damage done in the storm.
Murals would become his favored medium, but not until after his move to Seoul, South Korea, where he worked as a teacher and illustrator for four years. That’s where he got into the graffiti scene and became Birdcap, and he attributes this metamorphosis to his fateful meeting with Korean artist Junkhouse.
“I learned how to paint murals under her,” he says. “She’s — I don’t know — five-foot-four and fearless and taught me a lot. But I wanted my name to have a similar cadence to hers, to have two syllables and to be two random English words put together. And you know the idiom ‘feather in your cap’? I thought a lot of feathers in your cap would be better luck. So a Birdcap is pretty lucky. But really I wanted to pay respect to her for all she was doing for me and getting me off the ground as an artist.”
When he moved back to the States, Birdcap eventually landed back in Memphis as a full-time artist, a profession he never thought he’d be able to claim. “It used to be, like, no jobs; you would have to beg someone to come and let you paint their walls,” he told Memphis Magazine in 2020, in a story that introduced readers to murals he had painted around town. Now, though, it’s not hard to find his work, readily visible at places like Eclectic Eye, the Art Center, Barbaro Alley, the Exchange Building, and Broad Avenue — and that’s just in Memphis. He’s also done murals nationally and internationally.
Even as a full-time artist with steady, and fairly impressive, work, Birdcap admits his own insecurity in his identity as an artist, especially as a Southern man raised in a culture that prescribes a certain kind of stoic masculinity.
“I never felt like I had a real job,” he says. “There was something immoral about artistry, like I’m cheating people of money somehow. And so I got into the type of artistry that is the most like construction work, which is murals. You show up at a jobsite early and work in the daytime and you are on a ladder and you’re using construction equipment.
“I think I’ve found the avenue that makes it feel like a Protestant work ethic. I think that’s something deeply Southern in me where I had to legitimize it to myself because there was a perception that it wasn’t work, which is ridiculous. I know that consciously and intellectually, but there’s some unconscious part of you that’s like, no, I’m cheating.”
“I think there’s magic here, and I think there’s room for mythology and folktales in a way that maybe other regions don’t have. We have a unique relationship to the power of myth, and so it’s not a big jump for me to think these make sense together.” — Birdcap
As much as “Iliumpta” is a reflection on the South and the Southern man, it has also been an opportunity for Birdcap to challenge his own perceptions. With this being a studio show, he cannot default on murals as a bridge between his art and his desire to “legitimize” himself. Instead, he must expose his own vulnerabilities as an artist, presenting his ideas in an intimate gallery setting.
“It’s a deal with the devil,” the artist says, “because if you work hard at anything — and it doesn’t have to be art — but if you work in any field as many hours as you have to work to be an artist, you need to have an unhealthy relationship, where it sort of defines you. That means when it’s going good you feel good, but then the day something bad happens, you’re like, I’m bad. It’s so intertwined with your spirit. But I’ve always wanted to do this and never thought of another job. I don’t think I’m good at very much.
“I’ve been pretty transparent about my own mental health over the last few years, and this work is an extension of that,” Birdcap continues. “The paintings are about the South and the Southern man, but in no way am I trying to divide myself from the Southern man. I am imperatively a Southern man. So all the faults displayed in the paintings, I see in myself.”
For this show, Birdcap experimented with different media beyond painting, like mosaic, sculpture, and silkscreen. “You have to keep the learning process in your routine or you get bored,” he says. “As technology advances, there are more and more intuitive ways to build art — I’m thinking specifically of AI but there’s a lot of other projects. I think of my brain as almost anachronistic or like regression. So, like, AI is becoming really big and I’m going to mortar and stones. I did a mural festival last year in Pompeii, Italy, and I was blown away by just how anti-ephemeral the work is, how long it’s lasted. And I just wanted to make some really analog work.”
Plus, it doesn’t hurt that mosaics have a built-in aesthetic of antiquity to go along with the Greco-Roman mythology at the core of the show. Yet, in true Birdcap style, his mosaics are “ridiculously cartoony” — as are the other pieces in the show.
“I like cartoons because when I was young, I would try to make dramatic work about my feelings or politics or whatever, but I would visualize it in this dramatic way,” he says. “And I think it had the opposite effect where people didn’t really want to pay attention to it. But I think cartoons are very safe and we all have this child-like relationship with them, and so it allows you to put these complicated or harder messages in but still be listened to. Like, it’s not baroque. It really is subtle.”
His piece, Too Much to Bear: The Suicide of Ajax, he points out, deals with male fragility quite darkly, yet because it is presented with saturated colors and is an inflatable, reminiscent of holiday decorations or childhood birthday parties, it takes on a sort of softness. But Birdcap says, “My character is Ajax, who basically got drunk with rage and really embarrassed himself, and the next day, unable to deal with this shame, he committed suicide. And so that could be a fairly heavy piece.”
Indeed, though the Iliad’s central conflict is a battle of pride between King Agamemnon and Achilles and “Iliumpta” contains depictions of both men, Birdcap has also pulled inspiration from peripheral characters, like Ajax, centering them as focal points in various pieces. In this way, he allows for multiple perspectives to take up space, opening up more entry points for viewers to connect with his narrative that blends ancient mythology with his Southern experiences.
Take his painting Mississiphus: Priam Rebuilds Ilium. “Troy is famously the city that fell twice,” Birdcap says. “I really liked that image of [King Priam] rebuilding the city, but it’s just like a single line; it’s not important to the main story. But Priam, quietly rebuilding the city, knowing the dangers of it, it just struck me as this moment to paint something that looks like Sisyphus, where it’s this man pushing a boulder up a hill trying to rebuild his home. And I wanted to play with the word Mississippi and so I cut it off in the painting to where you can read it as ‘Mississippi’ or you can read it as the title of the painting.”
Meanwhile, Hurricane Party: Myrmidons finds inspiration in Achilles’ soldiers, who scaled walls by climbing on top of each other’s shoulders. “I liked the idea of using Myrmidons as a relationship to hurricanes on the Gulf Coast,” the artist says, “so I have my characters stacked up on each other and there’s a flood line. There’s a couple above the water, and I titled it Hurricane Party, which is a popular and stupid thing we do on the coast where if a hurricane is coming, we don’t leave, we go and get drunk together. It sort of summed up one aspect of what I felt is kind of crazy about us as Southern coast people.”
Despite the craziness, he says, “I think there’s magic here, and I think there’s room for mythology and folktales in a way that maybe other regions don’t have. We have a unique relationship to the power of myth, and so it’s not a big jump for me to think these make sense together.”
As distant as characters originated in antiquity may seem, Birdcap has always kept them close. “That was always my favorite part of school when I was young,” he says. “Those stories are just so enchanting. … And I think one thing I saw in Pompeii and one thing I think about a lot now is, history is just so much shorter than we give it credit for. Like the people who were in Pompeii were going out and drinking and getting fast-food equivalents. Like they’re the same; we haven’t changed as a people. So those stories are extremely powerful because they’re so well-written and well-trodden.”
Mythology has been a recurring theme in his work, he says. “I feel bad that I might lose people on referencing something that’s not popular, but the safety of doing something that’s so old, in 20 years that’ll still be knowledge that we have. Whereas, if I make a reference to a current celebrity or a current trope, it might get lost. … So I just like the evergreen quality of myth.”
And truly that is the beauty of myth — its ability to captivate audiences across centuries as reimaginations, reinterpretations, and even misinterpretations that inspire and provoke. Since antiquity, myth has been a lens to analyze the human experience, yet there is no one meaning to glean from it, just as Birdcap hopes is the case with “Iliumpta.”
“I used to liken [artmaking] to streaking in the dark,” he says. “Like, if you’re a writer, you’re streaking in the daytime, you’re putting your heart out there, and everyone can read it and so they see all the details, which is far scarier to me than streaking at night. Yes, I’m putting myself out there, but it’s also coded. It’s in this visual hieroglyphic, where you can read whatever you want into it.”
Birdcap’s “Iliumpta” is on display at Crosstown Arts through April 28th.
