Much Handled Things Are Always Soft

In Much Handled Things Are Always Soft (2019), Derrick Woods-Morrow turns to the racial and systemic dynamics of cruising in 1970s Chicago. Segregationist policies like redlining compressed Black neighborhoods into densely populated grids, where public parks became necessary outlets—spaces where men could gather, touch, and pursue desire beyond identity or surveillance. At the center of the film is artist and long-term HIV survivor Patric McCoy, who recounts these intimacies and the fragile architectures that made them possible.

A guerrilla-style monument emerges across the video, a tribute to Black queer life too often erased or unacknowledged. The work honors what lingers in memory yet resists legibility, situating cruising as both intimate practice and political refusal.

The film has screened in major museums including MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, but reached its largest audience through the cellphone cruising app JACK’D, viewed by more than three million Black and Brown people in the U.S. and Canada. Later, the film was also featured in Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias Chapter 2: The Darkroom, a research-based project exploring sexuality, intimacy, and liberatory erotic practices in relation to colonial histories of orientalism and heteronormative policing of Queer, Muslim, Migrant, Black, and POC bodies. The project unfolded through talks, films, and artistic contributions, and its interactive website functioned like a virtual bathhouse or hammam, a navigable architecture of desire.

This type of digital infrastructure—where the erotic, the collective, and the archival converge—marks a point in Woods-Morrow’s career where his practice expands beyond galleries to imagine how communities might gather online. It serves as a jumping-off point for his continued exploration of web-based platforms as spaces of fugitivity, circulation, and queer belonging.

Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias Chapter 2: The Darkroom collaborators: Abdullah Qureshi (curator, and lead), Tamara Al-Mashouk, Morehshin Allahyari, Lina Bembe & Max Disgrace, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Mustafa Boga, Yara El Safi, Sunil Gupta, Jaya Jacobo, Abdi Osman, Blake Paskal, Hadi Rehman, Anthony Rosado, Queering Space x Amani Saeed, Umair Sajid, Begum Taara Shakar, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.