In this new work, artist and activist Zora J Murff challenges his own relationship to race and Blackness, using himself as a site for broader social critique and interrogate an increasing yet conflicting desire for status, success, and positioning.

Drawing on vernacular and family photographs, combined with newly produced images that challenge racial stereotyping, the artist presents these images as ‘affirmations’ as he learns to unpick and remake himself in his own image. Murff states “My early images were made when I was experiencing rapid upward social mobility and becoming acquainted with Arkansas and Mississippi, my ancestral landscapes. Visiting the birthplaces of my maternal and paternal families forced me to reflect on how we build identity, how identity can be created for us, and how those phenomena collide.”