Birdcap

Michael Roy, a.k.a. Birdcap, grew up near the bayous of southern Mississippi, on America’s verdant “Third Coast,” a region battered by hurricanes and scarred by a violent, racist political history. Roy studied painting at Memphis College of Art but got his start as a muralist when he left the South and moved halfway across the world, becoming part of the thriving street art scene in Seoul, South Korea, where the character of “Birdcap” was born. In the past decade, Birdcap’s career as a muralist has spanned continents, but the artist’s work is a product of the South, both a love letter to the region he calls home and a challenge to its problems. Birdcap works in a style equally steeped in Saturday-morning cartoons and history paintings, creating scenes that slide between references from Jim Henson to the Crossing of the Delaware. Using a vocabu- lary of fantastic shapes that make a Birdcap mural identifiable across the world, the artist tackles grief and loss and political anxieties and traverses a modern landscape both absurdly beautiful and troubled.