Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD; lives and works in New York) aims to challenge the tropes of American domestic prosperity through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings consisting of found objects, photographs, writings, and videos. His works present innocent and kind recollections of memories within surreal landscapes and elaborate, draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on interactions between friends, romantic partners, and family. Morris’s process of making is driven by improvisation and responding to changing environments where space, kinship, social interrogation, and available materials are explored and reflected.
Recent exhibitions include solo presentations On Paper at Deli Gallery, New York (2021) and Play Too Much at Baby Company, New York (2019); group exhibitions Minotaur's Daydream, Semiose, Paris, FR (2023); Ways of Being, Collaborations, Copenhagen, DA (2022); No Place, PPOW, New York (2020); The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021); and Potemkin/Body, Lubov, New York (2018). Morris was also included in Portrait of an Unlikely Space curated by Mickalene Thomas and Keely Orgeman, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven (2023) and Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Museum, Nashville, (2023). He was featured in the New Museum’s MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas: Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project (2018), and the two-person show, Inside Out, Here, La Mama Gallery, New York (2018).
Morris is the founder of 3 Dot Zine, a publication and public forum for marginalized concerns. He hosted the Brown Paper Zine and Small Press Fair with The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2018 and created a site-specific installation at the MoMA PS1 2018 NY Art Book Fair. His solo show at Terrault Contemporary was listed in Artforum as the “Best of 2017,” and Time named him as one of “12 African American Photographers You Should Follow” in 2017. Morris received the 2019 New York Artadia Award.
contact: devinnmorris@gmail.com
photo: samantha sutcliffe