Lightnin’ Field is a commemoration to Houston blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins, as well as to a Houston music venue Liberty Hall that was once located at 1610 Chenevert, on the edges of Houston’s downtown. The venue made a name for itself by featuring local and nationally known rock and roll and blues acts.

Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus’s body of work borrows from revisionist approaches within American history, particularly studies dealing with the formulation of black political and cultural movements. His work acts as a document of questioning, meditation and commemoration that seeks to distill, preserve and extend the ideas that fuel radical black political consciousness, social struggle and aesthetics. Cyrus’s narratives—both real and imaginary—highlight the complex relationships between history and the present through an unraveling of visual, performative and textual sources.