I make things that linger—sometimes in the corner of your eye, sometimes beneath your skin. I am drawn to what isn’t easily named: the residue of touch, the haunt of a gesture, the stories that forgot to end. My practice unfolds through stillness and motion, through sound, im/material, stitches, and images. It spirals around desire—not to resolve it, but to let it bloom without conclusion.
There are landscapes in me: Southern, queer, marooned. They shape how I see and how I ask others to look. Often, I return to pleasure, not as escape, but as method. I return to ruin. I return to kin. There’s no boundary between the artwork and the world—it all leaks, overlaps, contradicts.
Sometimes I build sanctuaries. Sometimes I build scenes. Sometimes I just hold space for someone else to speak. I don’t always know what form the work will take, but I trust the impulse for no inherent vice - no collapse. It comes from what’s been carried, what’s been withheld, and what refuses to disappear.
b. 1990, Greensboro, NC | Lives and works in Providence, RI and Chicago, IL
Derrick Woods-Morrow is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work unfolds at the juncture of Black queer desire, spatial intimacy, and collective memory. Engaging photography, sculpture, glass, video, performance, and installation, Woods-Morrow constructs allegorical architectures that trouble the divide between public record and private truth. His practice begins in the quotidian—mattresses, salt, lint, sweat, breath—and expands toward speculative world-building, conjuring fugitive geographies shaped by audience participation, and cohabitation.
Originally from Brown Summit, North Carolina, Woods-Morrow draws from the layered histories of the American South and its Black diasporic entanglements. His work mines the residues of collective memory and bodily experience—often invoking the sonic, the tactile, and the unseen—to unearth how pleasure, grief, and desire persist under conditions of erasure. A through-line in his practice is the act of gathering: not only materials and archives, but kin, community, and breath. Collaboration is central—his subjects are not static figures but co-authors of new family lore, queered ruins, digital portals, and ritual sites for remembrance and emergence.
Notable works include haint cimarrón | there are black people in the future (2023), a machine learning-based archival film exhibited through a peephole in a bathroom stall that connects Black southern migration to speculative digital futures; How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? (2022), a sculptural installation of twin mattresses with embedded subwoofers that collapse and heave under low-frequency bass; and Much Handled Things Are Always Soft (2019), a film meditating on cruising, intimacy, and collective survival through the voice of long-term HIV survivor Patric McCoy. His installations, which he sees as social architectures, frequently feature sonic activations—Aretha Franklin vocals, trap music basslines, breath recordings—that engage the body through vibration, often functioning as sites for contemplation, gathering, and slowness.
Woods-Morrow has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kunsthal KAdE (Netherlands), Schwules Museum (Berlin), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm). His first major solo exhibition, Gravity Pleasure Switchback, opened at Gallery 400 in 2023. Recent and upcoming projects include residencies at the Camargo Foundation (France), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and independent research in Spain, where he is developing a new work that unearths the erased histories of queer enslaved peoples lost at sea.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Creative Visionary Grant from the Black Artists & Designers Guild (2023), The Sundance Uprise Grant, the Gary & Denise Gardner Fund (3Arts Foundation), and the MacColl Johnson Fellowship. A committed educator, Woods-Morrow holds the Schiller Family Associate Professorship in Race in Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he teaches across Sculpture, Textiles, and Painting.
Through a practice marked by sensual rigor and archival intuition, Woods-Morrow reimagines historical trauma not as static loss, but as an aperture—one through which the Black queer present, in all its multiplicity, can be felt, held, and made to shimmer.