Photographer Zora J Murff’s Collages Ask Audiences to Pay Attention

In 2006, Michael Richards, famous for his role as Kramer from Seinfeld, became the subject of controversy when he repeatedly hurled racial slurs at Black audience members during a comedy set. Consequently, it’s fitting that Kramer features prominently in “The Devil Hiding in Plain Sight,” artist and educator Zora J. Murff’s exhibition of mixed-media works showing at Abakus Projects through March 16. In the collage titled Woah Nigga, Die Slow Nigga (Cooning) (2022), Kramer poses behind blackface and an oversized grill while sorrounded by a miasma of racially charged imagery: wallet prints of Jeffrey Dahmer and Clarence Thomas, among others. Comedians, politicians, and murderers—these personas and their negative ties to Blackness come from distant cultural strata. Yet it’s the ways that Murff manages to form new synapses between dissonant images that reveal how deep white supremacy has bored into western life.

Likewise can be said for another collage, Nigga drawing the American Genre (after Howardena Pindell) (2021). This work consists of a textbook clipping of the Dutch Black caricature, Black Pete, effaced by a postage stamp depicting the Mayflower. Individually, the stamp and clipping are case studies of icons of colonialism and racism that have been diluted to the point of becoming banal. The aggressions implicit in each image have been blunted by their respective cultures, but Murff emphasizes that they’re nonetheless present. Furthermore, the postage stamp, inevitably turning what it’s pasted onto into a unit of commerce, prevents us from localizing these aggressions. Together, the stamp and clipping reflect the sinister truth that the violence plaguing these images have and continue to traverse cultural lines. 

Works like the eponymously titled triptych, The Devil Hiding in Plain Sight (2024), speak to the ramifications of said violence. These collages are emblazoned with burning buildings, speckled with bombs, and strewn with bones. Black people held at gunpoint are displayed next to images of Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, and the Philadelphia police’s bombing of Black liberation group MOVE. Murff’s intentionality comes to light with his focus on the gestural as a means toward revelation. One collage compares photos depicting the arrests of Dylann Roof and MOVE member Ramona Africa. Whereas in cropped versions of the respective images Murff zooms in on Africa’s cuffed hands, he alternatively zooms in on Roof’s face devilishly squinting at the camera while he licks his lips. Evidently, what we call justice does nothing to quell the gluttony of white supremacy, and in the case of Africa, they’re one and the same.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this reality is explored in the four works titled The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) (2024). Each work is based on a different still from a documentary about the murder of Black Panther Party Chairman, Fred Hampton, by Chicago Police. The first still (from left to right), orbited by magazine clippings of a Black man’s eyes, hair, and a cartoonish Klansman, shows a man standing in the scene of Hampton’s murder. The subtitle reads: “this is where our chairman had his brains blown out…” I initially winced at the clarity of this announcement, at the pulse throbbing beneath “brains blown out.” Following his murder, Hampton became a metaphor for what America does to those who try to nudge it forward—an example of a state-sanctioned depravity little different from Dahmer’s own mutilation of Black bodies. After all, there’s little that separates the scene—bloodstained mattress and all—from what you’d see on a true crime documentary. The works never stray from the immediacy of this depravity, such as in the last still, which features Hampton’s fiancée, Akua Njeri. Detailing her point of view of the murder, Njeri resignedly leans back while her child sits on her lap. The poignancy is palpable, but the final words she recounts saying to Hampton, seared into the still, remain as galvanizing as ever:  “Chairman, Chairman, wake up! The pigs are vampin’!”

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“The Devil Hiding in Plain Sight” is on view through through March 16, 2025, at Abakus Projects, 450 Harrison Avenue, #309A, Boston, MA.