Jayson Scott Musson

Biography

In writing, performance, and visual art that incisively satirize pop culture and the art world, Jayson Scott Musson provokes the boundaries that define cultural stereotypes. Musson's most well-known project is Hennessy Youngman, a character who hosts an episodic Internet series, Art Thoughtz, in which he pits hip-hop and art world idioms against each other in a dual parody of cultural clichés. Musson's audience extends beyond the confines of art institutions, as he deliberately enters the open arenas of mass media such as YouTube.

A major theme in Musson's work is African-American social identity, recognizing Blackness as a role conferred by a history of discrimination. Musson inhabits certain racial stereotypes in order to displace them and conjure a more ambivalent identity, one that comes closer to reflecting his personal experience of being Black. "PackofRats," Musson's MC name in the Philadelphia-based hip-hop group Plastic Little, was an early persona that Musson once likened to the disaffected, nihilistic main character in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. PackofRats posed as a dubious public figure that used the in-your-face lyrics of gangster rap and hip-hop to vocalize his own feelings of displacement economically and socially. A rat also was the insignia on a series of text-based broadside posters entitled Too Black for B.E.T. (2002-06), a project musing on racial identity in America in the aftermath of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Musson explored a more intimate voice in the confessional column "Black Like Me" for the Philadelphia Weekly (2007), where he opined on such topics as love and relationships, Star Wars memorabilia, and Al Qaeda.

In 2010, while in graduate school for studio art, Musson developed the persona of Hennessy Youngman - a name that plays on the comedian Henny Youngman, famous for his one-liners, and a liquor that is a status symbol in the hip-hop world. Just as PackofRats caricatured the exaggerated swagger of rappers, Hennessy Youngman hilariously deflates the exclusionary, pretentious terminology of art discourse. In Art Thoughtz— a series of short, talking-head addresses posted on YouTube—Youngman offers his irreverent views on topics such as relational aesthetics and institutional critique, the buzz around Damien Hirst's dot paintings, and the commodification of art. In addition to exposing the art world's stratification, Art Thoughtz is an empathetic account of any artist's struggle to define a unique and authentic identity, with the burden of art history upon him or her. In one of the most effective episodes, Youngman analyzes the power of personal mythology, likening how this has been used by seemingly polar opposites Joseph Beuys and Jay-Z.

Art Thoughtz conflates Musson's identity as an outsider with the insider game of the art world, further expressing his experience of a segregated culture. In an interview in the UK magazine "It's Nice That," Musson observed, "Hennessy was created to explore the dissonance between speaker and speech. I thought it would be interesting to see how 'Artspeak' would sound coming out of the mouth of someone without the seeming cultural authority to discuss what he was discussing. It's no secret that the world of art is rather isolated, a small world with high fences. Coming out of a background of making rap music, being I guess what you'd call a 'practitioner' of hip-hop then receiving a scholarship to get an MFA, I came into contact with fine art with an entirely different background, language and understanding of what art is, so with Hennessy, if I could play around with this art history, render it a victim to the alien's tongue, to render the ideas of the culture of fine art in a method unnatural to it, then I thought that would be a good deed to humanity. The jury is still out."

Jayson Scott Musson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1977. He received a BFA in photography from University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME in 2011.

His solo exhibitions include His History of Art, developed while artist in residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2022); We Sing in a Dead Language, Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg (2019); The Grand Manner at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2011); Neoteny/The Hard Sell at Marginal Utility Gallery, Philadelphia (2011); and Too Black For BET, Dazed & Confused Magazine Gallery, London (2008), as well as multiple presentations at Space 1026 and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, both in Philadelphia, and Salon 94 in New York.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; South London Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Grey Art Gallery, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Postmasters, New York; West Galerie, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Somerset County Jail, Skowhegan, ME; Grimmuseum, Berlin; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, among many others. His video pieces have been screened at venues including the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; The Box, Columbus, OH; Momenta Art, Brooklyn, and Cottage Home Gallery, Los Angeles.

Musson has performed and lectured at numerous venues, including Rhizome, New York; San Francisco Art Institute; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Performa 11, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX; University of Cincinnati; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

Musson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.