Zora J Murff | Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review)

Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York

17 November 2021 - 8 January 2022

Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review) is an exhibition of new sculptures, collages, and images from Zora J Murff, the winner of the first annual Next Step Award produced in collaboration with Baxter Street and Aperture.

As the award’s recipient, Murff was given carte blanche to expand his photographic practice by experimenting with image making that actively questions the status quo. Zora J Murff: Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review) centres around his experiences with anti-Blackness, tokenization, and gaslighting in the art world and academia.

The exhibition reflects Murff’s desire to name and dismantle the anti-Black violence he has experienced in order to effect change in problematic spaces and systems. Murff’s work in sculpture and collage is a discursive narrative on the evolution and perpetuation of this violence and grapples with the complicated entanglement of the photographic medium with the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race. Bold As Brass continues the artist’s development of a new visual language and purpose—often contextualized by found or appropriated images and commissioned texts—pioneered in his acclaimed series, “At No Point In Between.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by the launch of Murff’s first major monograph, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis), a 220-page book to be published by Aperture with generous support by the 7G Foundation, Baxter St’s partners in the establishment of the Next Step Award.

Zora J Murff will be in conversation with artist and arts educator, William Camargo on 16 December. More information here.