Biography

Courtney Desiree Morris’ work examines the complexities of place, ecology, memory, and the constant search for “home”. The artist examines these questions through the experiences of female ancestors and elders whose stories often disappeared in family histories and official historical narratives. Working across photography, video, installation and performance, Courtney Desiree Morris’ work is concerned with understanding the ways that we inhabit places – through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory – and how places inhabit us. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Fototeca de Cuba, San Francisco Art Institute, TBA21 and Fyre Art Museum. In addition to her artistic practice, she is also an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California in Berkeley.

Soil (2016)

The two photographs displayed here come from the series Soil (2016), reconceptualizing Courtney Desiree Morris’ paternal family’s relationship to the agroindustrial landscapes of south Florida. The sugarcane fields surrounding Belle Glade attracted thousands of labor migrants from the Anglophone Caribbean from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. This work serves as a meditation on the fraught connections between blackness, labor, migration and the multiple afterlives of slavery throughout the African Diaspora. As one of the first truly global commodities, sugar has played a central role in the making of the modern world. Centering the artist’s body, the images fold together past and present as a form of sacred memory. They also highlight the tensions between environmental racism and the deep, ancestral connections to land of Black communities.