In a modest industrial area of downtown Los Angeles, artist and academic Boz Deseo Garden has established a unique studio space named The Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery. The center, opened in June, functions as both a creative and intellectual hub where Garden explores the ongoing legacies of slavery through the lens of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. It also serves as a resource for researchers and members of the public, who can schedule visits to engage with its collection.

Garden, who uses they/them pronouns and is a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, draws heavily from the school of thought known as Afro-pessimism. This framework, associated with scholar Frank B. Wilderson III, asserts that Blackness was constructed alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a category fundamentally defined by its opposition to recognized humanity—a condition that remains unaltered. Garden’s work, which they describe as “Black conceptualism,” reflects these ideas by using everyday objects imbued with historical and symbolic connections to slavery’s enduring impact.

This month, Garden is preparing to present an installation titled "Célia, or the Misfortunes of Virtue" at Art Basel Paris. The piece features two nine-foot-tall lightning rods positioned beside busts of French colonial explorers Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, the latter the founder of Quebec City. These figures are linked to New France, a colony known to have enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples during the early 17th century. Garden’s installation engages with these histories in a manner that blends fact and fiction.

The inspiration for the work traces back to an incident in October 2020 when shipping containers fell into Britain’s Bristol Channel, washing ashore along coasts with cargo spilling over beaches in Devon and Wales. Historically, the Bristol Channel was a major hub for British slave trading, and numerous slave ships reportedly sank there. While no physical remains of slave ships survive in museums, Garden imagines the possibility that an antique lightning rod, one of the objects declared to have washed ashore, might have touched such a vessel during its journey.

Garden later disclosed that the story of the lightning rod’s origin is entirely fabricated, emphasizing the artistic choice to invoke fiction as a means to explore the persistent presence of slavery’s aftereffects. They suggest that while the terror symbolized by slave ships may be too direct to confront, everyday objects can carry the legacy of slavery in subtler ways. "Perhaps the terror comes back when you realize that the objects of slavery, the chain, the ship, are no longer necessary," Garden said.

Originally from a Northern California town surrounded by farmland, Garden’s early career focused on photography with an ecological perspective. However, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point, prompting a more confrontational and introspective approach to their work. Garden acknowledges that their art has become more pessimistic since then but expresses a sense of creative freedom in engaging with challenging themes without needing to offer affirmative answers.

Garden has exhibited across Europe, including in London, Basel, and now Paris, noting that audiences there are often more willing to engage with difficult and uncomfortable topics related to history and complicity. By contrast, they observe that the United States struggles to acknowledge these issues fully, partly because doing so would require substantive societal change.

At the intersection of research and art, Boz Deseo Garden’s practice confronts the continued reverberations of slavery, seeking to provoke reflection on how its legacy permeates the present through complex and layered narratives.