Abigail DeVille
(b. 1981)2013–14 Artist in ResidenceInfluenced by her grandmother’s collection of unwanted odds and ends from neighbors, Abigail DeVille collects trash to recover similarly discarded histories of Black and Latinx immigrant communities in New York.
Biography
Born to an Afro-Dominican mother who immigrated to Harlem in the early 1960s and an African American father who was raised in the Bronx, Abigail Deville holds close both Harlem and the Bronx in her life and in her work.
She explores both earthly sites, such as an empty Harlem lot thought to be a seventeenth-century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans, and the cosmos as a site of expansive dreaming and potential for marginalized peoples. DeVille utilizes recognizable structures and symbols, such as scaffolding, spaceships, mannequins, and the United States flag, to traverse the local and the galactic while interrogating freedom as both a constitutional value and personal liberation.
DeVille has exhibited at museums including the Bronx Museum, New York (2022–23); the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas (2021); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011). Her work is in the institutional collections of the Bronx Museum, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee. She received a Creative Capital grant and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She participated in ArtStar, a mid-2000s reality TV show. DeVille obtained her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was a 2013–14 Studio Museum artist in residence, and her work was featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Fore (2012–13)—the fourth in the series of “F” Shows at the Studio Museum, which focused on emerging artists.
Exhibitions and Events
Abigail DeVille
(b. 1981)2013–14 Artist in ResidenceInfluenced by her grandmother’s collection of unwanted odds and ends from neighbors, Abigail DeVille collects trash to recover similarly discarded histories of Black and Latinx immigrant communities in New York.
George, 2017
Biography
Born to an Afro-Dominican mother who immigrated to Harlem in the early 1960s and an African American father who was raised in the Bronx, Abigail Deville holds close both Harlem and the Bronx in her life and in her work.
She explores both earthly sites, such as an empty Harlem lot thought to be a seventeenth-century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans, and the cosmos as a site of expansive dreaming and potential for marginalized peoples. DeVille utilizes recognizable structures and symbols, such as scaffolding, spaceships, mannequins, and the United States flag, to traverse the local and the galactic while interrogating freedom as both a constitutional value and personal liberation.
DeVille has exhibited at museums including the Bronx Museum, New York (2022–23); the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas (2021); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011). Her work is in the institutional collections of the Bronx Museum, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee. She received a Creative Capital grant and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She participated in ArtStar, a mid-2000s reality TV show. DeVille obtained her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was a 2013–14 Studio Museum artist in residence, and her work was featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Fore (2012–13)—the fourth in the series of “F” Shows at the Studio Museum, which focused on emerging artists.
Exhibitions and Events