Jamal Cyrus’s Sanctuary design, titled X-plane, explores the notion of sacred ground. It begins with a rubbing the artist made of the sidewalk outside New York’s Audubon Ballroom, a cultural monument from early-twentieth-century Harlem and the place where black rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Cyrus overlays the rubbing with imagery of the first page of Malcolm X’s FBI file, an unremarkable institutional form displaying only bits of code and procedural information, and marred by redactions. The artist likens the geometric structure of the form to a building plan, explaining, “From this perspective the document becomes the representation of a three-dimensional space—in this case an archive, a reservoir of information, knowledge, and possibly enlightenment; a place where reading is done ritualistically, and new insights beyond the two-dimensional plane are revealed.”
