Zora J Murff: Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review), Baxter St CCNY

Baxter St at CCNY is pleased to present Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review), an exhibition of new sculptures, collages, and images from Zora J Murff, the winner of the first annual Next Step Award. 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) centers around his experiences with anti-Blackness, tokenization, and gaslighting in the art world and academia. 

Bold As Brass (or, Third Year Review) 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.

 In 2020, Zora J Murff was the first artist to receive the Next Step Award, which aims to identify strong emerging or evolving voices whose work deserves greater recognition providing scholarship, exhibition opportunities, and advocacy from two leading organizations in the field of photography. Murff was selected by a nominating committee of esteemed artists, writers, art historians, and curators that included Dawoud Bey, Nayland Blake, Isolde Brielmaier, Zoe Buckman, Howie Chen, Carmen Hermo, Justine Kurland, An-My Lê, Christopher Lew, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Aspen Mays, Sarah Hermanson Meister, José Parlá, Seph Rodney, Antwaun Sargent, Drew Sawyer, Lisa Sutcliffe, Mickalene Thomas, Ka-Man Tse, Jasmine Wahi, Deborah Willis, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa.