Artist Statement:

I want to discover and draw out intimate dialogues that otherwise can’t occur in public: about Black sexual freedoms that social norms and governmental authorities consistently deny us. I want to navigate my own sexuality, my practice, and my life fluidly, confidently, and conscientiously. For me, this involves blurring and dismantling boundaries between art, social activism, and sex. My work therefore spirals out from intimate encounters with others as we use art to spark dialogues that enrich everyone.

Joyful Black sexuality is easy to dismiss as obscene or irrelevant. But making artwork about it with collaborators and then sharing it publicly is a form of activism. It allows Black queer folx to participate in rest. The sexual acts it engages and the emotional intimacy it creates build real spaces for us to recharge and thrive. My collaborators are more than artistic subjects. They become family – my queer kin. And my practice leaves in its wake queer home movies, new family lore, artifacts, and heirlooms that recognize unwritten histories and create the spaces I want us to occupy in the future.

My Black queer ethics shape my work as an artist, cultural historian, educator, and sexual health activist. As I now reside in Rhode Island, a state that played a leading role in the transatlantic slave trade, I am contending with the Migratory and radicalized histories of Globalized Black Queer Fol(x). My newest body of work intends to bring to Rhode island, meditations on my Tuareg North African ancestry, archival research throughout the American South, and multimedia forms of documentation from a global community of Black folk contending with pleasure disenfranchisement. This project tentatively titled S.E.X Firm takes ethnographic and anthropological research from sites of colonial contact and uses this research as the basis for a hybridized form of black cultural propagation - a maroon colony containing counter-disciplinary research about sexual ethics, black currency, and artistry.

Bio:

Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Derrick Woods Morrow’s work reflects on his experience growing up in the Black American South and centers on the exploration of Black sexuality and the complex journey in navigating this discovery. Woods-Morrow’s practice spans photography, film, installation, performance, and sculpture to capture and illustrate the queering of Blackness and the spaces in which this takes place. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Schwules Museum in Berlin; the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and UIC Gallery 400, among many other instituions across the world.

He has completed residencies at Center of Photography Woodstock (2023/2024), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2021), Antenna Works (2020/21), Chicago ArEsts CoaliEon (2018), the Fire Island Artist Residency (2016) and ACRE (2015).

He is the recipient of the Creative Visionary Grant from the Black Artists & Designer Guild (2023), 3Arts Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2023), the Rhode Island MacColl Johnson Fellowship (2023), the Uprise Grant from the Sundance Film Institute (2021), the 3Arts Gary and Denise Gardner Fund Award (2021), and the Artadia Award–Chicago (2018).

Woods-Morrow holds a Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design and teaches sculpture, painting, and textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Woods-Morrow is represented by Engage-Projects. He can be reached below or at the gallery. Please send all inquiries for commissions, media request & exhibition opportunities through e-mail. To inquire click ‘open form’ - Thank you.