Convening in the Reeds

Visit Devin N. Morris’s gallery in And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23 for a special listening experience organized by the artist. Recorded readings by Morris, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Parisa Esfahani, Clifford Prince King, and J Wortham play on a loop in the gallery. Building on the poetics of form, landscape, and material in Morris’s multimedia works on view, this soundscape offers a moment of stillness and an opportunity to gather and listen.

Featured recordings include:
“Character 01, James” by Clifford Prince King
“Untitled” by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
“Even Black Holes Give Birth,” excerpted from the forthcoming Work of Body by J/enna Wortham
“Untitled” by Devin N. Morris
“Warm Up” by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
“Cedar Grove” by Clifford Prince King
“Untitled” by Devin N. Morris
“For Frank” by Parisa Esfahani
“Character 02, Billie” by Clifford Prince King

Devin N. Morris challenges the tropes of American domestic prosperity through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed-media paintings of found objects, photographs, writings, and videos. His works present recollections of memories within surreal landscapes and elaborate, draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on interactions between friends, romantic partners, and family. Morris’s process of making is driven by improvisation and responding to changing environments that explore and reflect space, kinship, social interrogation, and available materials.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Occasionally, the work turns away from standard archival prints to examine photography as a sculptural, redactive, and site-specific process. He has completed residencies at Fire Island Artist Residency and Abrons Art Center in New York; St. Roch Community Church in Louisiana; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He is a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography and received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2019. Brown received his BFA in photography from New York University and is a part-time lecturer in Photography at the New School in New York. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene in New York and is based in New York.

Parisa Esfahani writes poetry and mixes audio to make it all make sense. She is interested in the personal lives of revolutionaries and finding meaning in grief and identity.

Esfahani is a social worker in Southern California.

Clifford Prince King is an artist residing in New York. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer Black man. In these instances, communion morphs into an offering of memory His work is in the collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; ICA Miami; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been featured in publications such as Apartamento, Aperture, BUTT, Cultured, The CUT, Dazed, Fantastic Man, Frieze, Gagosian Quarterly, i-D, Interview, T Magazine, the New York Times, Vice, Vogue, and the Wall Street Journal.

J/enna Wortham is a sound healer, herbalist, art critic, and cohost of the podcast “Still Processing.” They are also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. They are currently working on a book about the body and dissociation called Work of Body for Penguin Press.