Maroon/z

Born and raised in Brown Summit, North Carolina, Derrick Woods-Morrow creates work that probes the complexities of Black queer life—its pleasures, contradictions, inheritances, and unapologetic beauty. Staging queer architectures in the folds of Black daily life he describes his practice as promiscuous—unsettling the boundary between the intimate and the monumental, the body and the archive, desire and refusal; as currency.

Maroon/z engages the Atlantic as both material and metaphor—salt, sound, and ancestral memory coalescing into immersive digital landscapes. Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation and Sylvia Wynter’s reimagining of the human, Maroon/z conjures a fugitive geography where opacity becomes a method of relation. The project transforms the historical violence of the Middle Passage into a speculative architecture of Blackened and queered afterlives—home movies, artifacts, ruins, portals, and heirlooms.