The Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery (MSRCAS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in California dedicated to the collection, study, and presentation of materials that engage with the ongoing legacies of Atlantic slavery and antiblackness in the United States and abroad. Located in Los Angeles, MSRCAS operates as a reading room, viewing room, and archival resource that supports theoretical research, curatorial inquiry, and public programming related to the legacies of Atlantic slavery. With a focus on both historical and contemporary materials—including books, rare books, exhibition catalogs, artist publications, and a media library—MSRCAS serves as a site of interdisciplinary engagement at the intersection of Black studies and Black contemporary art.
CONTRIBUTE TO OUR COLLECTION
TEAM
RESEARCH COLLECTION SERIES
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER
1115 E Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, California, USA 90021
Our physical location is coming early 2026!
Programming
Upcoming
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session V: Queer Desublimation and Trans Anarchitecture
Saturday, April 25 2026
12 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Guest Speakers: Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session VI: Black Art & N’est Pas
Saturday, May 16 2026
12 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Guest Speakers: Patrice Douglass, David Marriott, and Rizvana Bradley
Past
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session IV: Ab-sens, Lalangue, Pas-Tout: Art and (Self-)Ruin
Saturday, March 28 2026
12 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Guest Speakers: Fred Moten and Éric Alliez
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session III: Masochism Beyond Sublimation
Saturday, March 14 2026
12 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session II (b): Use of Symptoms
March 6 2026
1 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Guest Speakers: Luke Thurston, Ann Pellegrini, Avgi Saketopoulou
Link to Session Recordings
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session II (a): Use of Symptoms
Saturday, February 28 2026
12 pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Guest Speakers: Derek Hook, Marcus Coelen, and Jamieson Webster
Link to Session Recordings
Corrosive Sublimation: Art & Ab-sense, Session I: A Psychoanalytic Introduction to the Artist
Saturday January 31 2026
12pm EST
Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
Link to recording
Latent Space
An open conversation led by Boz Garden on the occasion of Coleman Collins’ exhibition at Ehrlich Steinberg
Wednesday October 29 2025
5:30pm
Location: 5540 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
The accompanying texts can be found here:
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 1952
Teju Cole, Tremor, 2023
Book Talk for Patrice D. Douglass’s Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence; joined by Ebony Oldham and Jordan Mulkey
September 21st, 2025
Location: Zoom
Link to Recording
ABOUT US
Boz Deseo Garden
Founder & Co-Director
Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997) is an artist and academic working between Los Angeles and Paris. Garden’s interdisciplinary practice traces a social and intellectual history of literature and aesthetic practices that survey the capacity of art to represent the horrors of racial slavery and/or the suffering of Blackness.
They received their BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, their MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and are currently a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Irvine in the Culture & Theory Program. They are the Founder and Co-Director at the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery in Los Angeles.
Harrison K. Smith
Co-Director and Affiliated Faculty
Harrison Kinnane Smith’s collaborative work and site-specific interventions critique public institutions and financial systems. He is a Co-Founder of PlaceHolder Gallery, LA, and Affiliated Faculty and Co-Director of the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery.
Zenobia Lee
Co-Director and Affiliated Faculty
Zenobia Lee is a Los Angeles-based artist whose sculpture-based practice seeks clarity and meaning residing within a particular object or material. Rooted in the enduring colonial histories of the Caribbean and its diaspora, her work traces the ways queerness, the homoerotic, and desire take shape—how they persist, shift, flatten.
Zenobia received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles (2025) after graduating with a BFA from Oberlin College in Ohio (2018). She is the co-founder of Sucking Salt—a collaborative research project focused on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics, and Affiliated Faculty and Co-Director of the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery. Lee is in the public collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL; and the North Carolina State Historic Sites and Properties.