Devin N. Morris and Jenna Wortham in Conversation

May 21, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

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 continuing a residency from 2020 that was interrupted by the pandemic. She is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation; Jenna is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, co-host of the podcast Still Processing, and will be working on a book about the body and dissociation.