Upcoming Exhibition:

Devin N. Morris

Thank You For Being Here!

November 22, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Opening Reception: Nov 22, 6-8 pm

CPM Gallery is thrilled to announce its upcoming exhibition of recent works by Devin N. Morris, entitled Thank You For Being Here!. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Through fictive reimaginings Devin N. Morris’s multidisciplinary art practice critically engages with systems of value and the tropes of domestic prosperity, as well as the social mores of race, sex, and sexuality. He creates works that combine painting, drawing, and photography with found objects, detritus, and ephemera discovered on daily walks through New York, Baltimore City and beyond. The material memory and emotional charge of these objects’ past lives, when activated within Morris’s complex arrangements, take on a linguistic character. Pieces of discarded clothing and furniture, moldings, liquor bottle caps, butterfly wings, plastic bags, and other objects become words, form sentences, and speak in image form. 

The title of the exhibition, Thank You For Being Here!, is taken from the ubiquitous American grocery bag. Here, however, the word “Shopping” is replaced with “Being”—exchanging the energy of consumption with an exclamation of gratitude. This sentiment also refers to symbiotic transit : life to death, lost to found, truth to myth. This show, in large part, considers the monumentality of death, love, family legacy, and how our traversal of these planes generates the nutrients upon which the future grows. 

The floor space of the gallery will display several 7ft tall freestanding works that incorporate collage, painting, assemblage, and mixed media, on substrates of USPS mail truck doors, which are repurposed as folding screens and picture frames, revealing familial scenes and material artifacts from the artist’s life. While he was growing up in Baltimore, Morris’s family had a contracting business with the United States Postal Service which has made these objects particularly sensitized. The walls of the gallery will display a group of large, curved and irregularly shaped works that improvise between personal and political environments, and surreal scenes of kinship between friends, family, and romantic partners.

Devin N. Morris was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1986 and currently lives and works in Harlem, New York. Recent exhibitions include: And Ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence, 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: Artist Who Make Zines, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023); Kindred Worlds: The Priscila & Alvin Hudgins Collection, Hudson River Museum, NY(2023); Earthly Pleasures, Deli Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Minotaur's Daydream, Semiose, Paris (2023); Ways of Being, Collaborations, Copenhagen (2022); On Paper, Deli Gallery, New York (2021); and The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021).

Recent residencies: Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2023); Residencia São João, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2022); ISCP Vision Fund Recipient, Brooklyn, NY(2021). Selected Bibliography: And Ever an Edge; Studio Museum Artists in Residence, New York Times, March 1(2024); For Devin N. Morris, Life's Roles Are Art and Inspiration, Cultured Magazine, July 12 (2023); Artist Devin Morris Creates Space to Explore Male Intimacy, Out Magazine, May 1(2019); Imperfect Tools for Navigation, The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 7 (2018).