Devin N. Morris

Brooklyn-based artist Devin N. Morris (b. 1986) creates genre-defying assemblages spanning print culture, performance, storytelling, and sculpture. His works honor a belief that one should “use what you have to make what you need” and prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes. Morris’s goal is to abstract American life and subvert traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity.

Morris recognizes the poetics, care, and self-determining potential in salvage and bricolage as vehicles for intimacy, imagination, and world building. Through his use of found materials collected on city walks in Baltimore and New York, he questions the collective use and disuse of objects and bodies, considering the ways that social value informs our future. The artist says that he “questions how intimacy and ownership transform the utility of domestic spaces and extend their mythology. Each found material within [his] works … is handled as an archive where markings, dirt, and visible wear lend clues to domestic histories.”

Morris uses these material explorations to disclose gestural kindnesses between real and imagined characters; these characters have been inspired by his experiences growing up as a Black boy in Baltimore and by his later experiences navigating the world as a queer Black man. He describes, “The works are emotionally charged and sumptuous, as subjects appear simultaneously familiar and out of reach. In these interactions between person and place, both intimate and imagined, I break down and reconfigure what one assumes of the spaces we occupy, both within and outside of ourselves.”

Morris received a B.A. from Towson University in journalism and new media and another B.A. from the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, in fashion merchandising.