Political philosopher Joy James speaks with author Jasmine Syedullah, together with curator Terence Washington. The speakers will inform and discuss Murff’s artistic examination of the overarching structures that shape Black Americans’ desires and aspirations for the things that only appear to be liberatory. This subject matter is further explored in Murff’s forthcoming MASS MoCA exhibition RACE/HUSTLE, curated by Terence Washington, Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow.

RACE/HUSTLE is on view beginning December 6, 2025.

About the Exhibition:
Zora J Murff makes photographs, assemblages, videos, and text works that examine fast and slow violence, the rhythms and resonances of oppression throughout history and into our present, and the desire we are indoctrinated to cultivate for what ultimately hurts us. He is attentive to the structures of state violence in the U.S. and abroad and how they interlock with the mechanisms that make the effects of systems of domination invisible in everyday life. Murff’s photographs alternately capture poignant portraits, shots of playful light, the movement of cities, or signs of quiet life despite the odds. His collages combine text and images from a myriad of sources. For Murff, no issue is a single issue when the havoc created abroad is paid for, dearly, at home.

Read more about the exhibition here.

About the Speakers:
Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers seeking social/environmental justice and the abolition of captivity, militarism, and war. James is the editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader and Imprisoned Intellectuals, and co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader. Her recent books include: In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. James’ current edited volumes are: ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures; Beyond Cop Cities; and Confronting Counterinsurgency.

Following a tradition of Black study that begins outside the university, Jasmine Syedullah thinks the future of abolition alongside the radical care and repair of its multi-generational archives of activist knowledges, prison intellectuals, poverty scholarship, queer-of-color led organizing against intimate and state sanctioned violence, and disability justice movements. Her current research delves into the creative lives and liberation practices of captives. Drawing on a cross-section of literary artifacts, her current book project “Truants Congregate in Loopholes,” revisits Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as both a sacred text and critical accounting of the carceral culture of slavery — still working, as the book argues, to dismantle the binary logics of the time of slavery from the inside out. Syedullah’s account of Jacobs claims truancy is rooted in a tradition of congregational abolition, requiring relational protocols for mapping the carceral logics of modern freedom otherwise, teaching us how to congregate inside the active contradictions of a carceral politics of recognition and co-create abolition democracy together. Syedullah is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Vassar College and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books, 2016). Her published works can be found in Theory & Event; Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics; The Journal of Contemporary Political Theory; Society and Space; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review; and Truthout.

Terence Washington, an independent curator and writer, has been studying recently in the PhD program for Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is interested in artists’ visions of liberation, as well as how these visions work inside and outside of arts institutions. He has organized public programs at the National Gallery of Art and the Free Library of Philadelphia. He has also been an administrator for NXTHVN and Readying the Museum, as well as a guest curator at the MFA Boston. Washington has also written essays and poetry for exhibition catalogues and artist books, including two by Zora J Murff: At No Point in Between and True Colors (Or, Affirmations in a Crisis).

About the Artist:
Zora J Murff (b. 1987) is an Oregon-based artist and educator interested in liberation from anti-Blackness. He uses his creative practice to explore the politics of racialization using provocative imagery, and practices photography expansively, stretching it across disciplines to create associative or implied images. He strives to speak plainly about visual culture and its entanglement with race, capitalism, and other forms of hierarchical oppression.