Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD; lives and works in New York)

I am a multi-disciplinary artist whose works examine the landscape of domesticity, its architecture and relics, to reclaim fragments of familial legacy and inheritance by divining notions of home in collaged paintings, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and video performance. Growing up, I moved often, sometimes multiple times in one year, which sensitized my relationship to space and gave me a nuanced perspective on what constitutes home. Eventually, I rarely identified a specific place as home, as more readily my family, a coat, and school began to define “home.” My body and memory serve as physical and spiritual monikers of proof that I have home, as the houses and elders of my youth became increasingly elusive. Home to some is a place where belongings can be stored and maintained, relationships abound and are evidenced. That tension of home as place and the body as carrier of home is reflected in the vulnerable objects (discarded on the street, exposed to nature) that I find a tender need to save and then reuse in collage and assemblage structures. Their vulnerabilities seemingly reflect political reorganizations of space in Black and queer life. Crises of displacement and subjugation are intertwined with peaceable appeals.

My images reflect desire, love, mourning, and longing. Alighting themes of Americana, dissolution of domestic foundations, and subtle gestures of care intertwined with architectural refuse, memories, and imagined outcomes. Not everyone has access to home as a metaphor for security or peace. In an envisioned scenario in a painting, sometimes bodies carry all of their belongings on their surface. There is an intermediary stasis where a door can personify a dead relative or a bird composed of items found on a walk can speak for a community. What is left when all is lost or passed on? To answer this question, I juxtapose quotidian gestures and forms against unconventional and traditional materials.

Considering my practice through geometry, one idea is a point; between two ideas, a line forms; and from three ideas, one can draw a triangle or a circular understanding. With three points of consideration present, I initialize the complete idea into an artwork. Ideas materialize from a running list of visions, written language, whispers and dream images, discarded material and a desire to realize a technique. The process of triangulation helps me determine which medium to approach a work through. The works are emotionally charged and sumptuous, as subjects appear both familiar and out of reach. Through using the familiar to evoke emotion and personify human persistence, vernacular objects reflect the material conditions of society. I reanimate what has and what could be lived.

Recent Acquisitions: Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and the University of Maryland Baltimore County Albert Albin O. Kuhn Gallery.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Thank you for Being Here at CPM, Baltimore (2024); On Paper, Deli Gallery, New York (2021); Play Too Much at Company Gallery, New York, NY (2019).

Recent group exhibitions include Pilot Light, PPOW, New York, NY (2026); Black Collage: Aesthetic Legacies, Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE (2026); From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2025); Contact Sport, Canada Gallery, New York, NY (2025); And Ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2023); Portrait of an Unlikely Space curated by Mickalene Thomas & Keely Orgeman, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven (2023); Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Museum, Nashville, (2023). Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023); Minotaur's Daydream, Semiose, Paris (2023); Ways of Being, Collaborations, Copenhagen (2022); and The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021).

Recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts Chiaro Award, Marin County, CA (2025); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2023); Residencia São João, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2022); ISCP Vision Fund Recipient, Brooklyn, NY (2021). Robert Blackburn Printmaking Fellow, New York, NY (2019), Artadia NY Fellow Award (2019).

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.

contact: devinnmorrisstudio@gmail.com