Devin N. Morris and Jenna Wortham in Conversation

Twenty Summers

Devin N. Morris is a Baltimore born, Brooklyn based artist who is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings, photographs, writings and video. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on male interactions, platonic and otherwise. The use of gestural kindnesses between real and imagined characters are inspired by his various experiences growing as a black boy in Baltimore, MD and his later experiences navigating the world as a black queer man. Memory subconsciously roots itself in the use of familiar household materials & fabrics, while symbolically he arranges it. Looking to buoy his new realities in a permanent real space, Morris posits his reimagined societies as a prehistory to futures that are impossible to imagine. Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and host of the culture podcast "Still Processing." A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked at Wired before joining the Times in 2008 and more recently, the New York Times Magazine. Wortham is an important voice on digital culture and new technologies, and is a co-author of “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew, coming out via One World 2020.