Material Histories: Artists in Residence 2013-14

This publication was organized on the occasion of the exhibition Material Histories : Artists in Residence 2013–14 at The Studio Museum in Harlem, July 17–October 26, 2014.

The Artist-in-Residence program and brochure are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; and by endowments established by the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Trust and Andrea Frank Foundation.

The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 W 125th Street New York, NY 10027 studiomuseum.org

Material Histories was organized by Lauren Haynes, Assistant Curator.

Lauren Haynes is Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

This publication was produced by Hallie Ringle, Curatorial Assistant and Jamillah James, Communications Coordinator, with Lauren Haynes.

Rujeko Hockley is Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she has worked on exhibitions including Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, BedStuy, and Beyond (2014), LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital (2013), The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013 (2013) and Unfolding Tales: Selections from the Collection (2013).

Designed by Common Name Copyedited by Jessica Lott Artists’ portrait by Paul Mpagi Sepuya Printing by Cosmos Communications This digital version updates a previously printed version of the brochure. © 2014 The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Lumi Tan is Assistant Curator at The Kitchen, New York. She is also Associate Editor of The Exhibitionist: Journal on Exhibition Making.

Nico Wheadon holds an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmith’s College, University of London and a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University.

She currently lives and works in New York as a curator, writer and creative consultant.

Studio view

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Photo by Adam Reich

KEVIN BEASLEY

Top: Untitled (husbandskin), 2013

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Bottom: Untitled (chest pack), 2014

KEVIN BEASLEY

Photos by Jean Vong

Studio view

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Photo by Adam Reich

KEVIN BEASLEY

Untitled (charger), 2013

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Photo by Jean Vong

KEVIN BEASLEY

Kevin Beasley A partial perspective on the work of Kevin Beasley

by Lumi Tan

How it looks Recently, Kevin and I were in his studio discussing how we never find formal descriptions of artworks quite that fulfilling; the words typically used are too objective, when each viewer comes to an artwork from a highly individualized place. He pointed to a sculpture in progress on the floor, and asked, “How would you describe this?” It was a rhetorical question, but I’ll attempt it here, since—for better or worse—the printed words in this essay will remain long after the ephemeral exhibition it accompanies. Like many of the sculptures Kevin was making at the moment, it was a bulbous, alien thing, that seemed to be halted

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on its way to becoming overgrown, bundled in clothing and other materials that had now fused together into something halfway between believably anthropomorphic and completely synthetic. I’m going to leave it at that, because looking is the easiest part, and what we’ve come to this museum to do.

How it feels Kevin encourages visitors to his studio to hold his sculptures, which are sized to be cradled in your arms, or gripped like a football. For all their substance—any of these sculptures could contain foam, resin, concrete, and many other quotidian materials—they are unexpectedly light. But this haptic perception isn’t necessary to experience Kevin’s sculptures; through their petrified surfaces, it’s impossible to feel that this is the type of nightgown that

KEVIN BEASLEY

his grandmother has favored for the past sixty years, or pick up on the personal significance—small or great—of other family remnants that Kevin has collected over the years.

Even these solid objects are vessels, carrying a different psychic weight for each person who encounters them.

How it sounds An artistic practice as expansive and restless as Kevin’s refuses to end with a mere look. I’ve witnessed him in a darkened room at Casey Kaplan gallery, cross-legged on the floor with turntables, pedals, and laptop within arm’s reach—an arrangement that restricts his movement. With sight stripped away, there’s not much to do other than sit back and absorb the sound that he produces. The sonic shifts between each sample suspends your attention and keeps you present, instead of overwhelming you with noise or volume. The specific context of the white cube gallery— a space created entirely for looking— temporarily became a void for the duration of the performance. This room also contains Kevin’s …for this moment, this moment is yours…

(2014) a customized reel-to-reel player that he has spliced thousands of hours worth of cassette tape audio onto. This piece functions in-between the indeterminate forms of his sculptures, and Kevin’s sound performances; in a way, it makes up for the absence of performances, with sound filling the spaces of the minimally–installed gallery. When performances do take place, the

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piece records audio rather than projects it. This time, when the lights are flipped back on and the reels reverse, it lands in the middle of an ’80s pop song. Our eyes quickly adjust, we adapt our bodies to be social again, and the audience and artist briefly register each other before exiting.

Kevin’s literal visibility as an artist—as a public body in an exhibition space—is a constant area of exploration and significance for him. At a recent performance at the Whitney Museum on pay-what-youwish admission night, he switched positions from producing sound to performing sound. Using his minimal tools of delay pedals, amplifiers and microphones, he created waves of distorted sound by moving, simply and fluidly, back and forth through a thicket of microphones. His body became the medium for sound.

The particular architectural conventions of museums dictate that performances often take place in open, central spaces that allow the museum public to be non-committal passersby, even if the performer is front and center. But Kevin knows these museum sites well. Sound is a way for him to catch this public in transient moments, to affect an audience without them even knowing. Case in point: during this performance, I was unsure if this minor rumbling I heard was just another artist’s sound installation bleeding from the lobby balcony above. At the time, the audience’s attention was focused on two dancers in front of us, and the sound was coming

KEVIN BEASLEY

from behind. But once we made the concerted decision to turn around, here was the visual proof: the artist was present, connecting the sound and the maker, body to machine.

The museum’s lights were all on, and the audience could all watch each other in addition to the artist.

How it comes together In response to my question about why he decided to use his body in this more performative way, Kevin explained that he wanted to take the physicality of being in the studio, where he wrangles material into sculpture, and use those movements to manipulate sound. During a later conversation, when Kevin laments that he now has to reckon with producing a “body of work,” I immediately envisioned these routine, but individualized, movements as the corollary to this term. After all, wouldn’t a “body of work” be an ideal manner in which to describe all he does? There are many immediately apparent bodies involved in his work: his body in the making, the viewers’ in the reception, and the imagined bodies in his sculptural forms, whose materials may reference the real bodies in his personal history. He additionally places great emphasis on the presence of other artists’ bodies when he invites performers, musicians or thinkers to share in his exhibition space; a “solo” exhibition

by Kevin will always be a group effort.

Rather than coming to these invited artists with prescribed ideas, each

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artist is called upon to do what they know. The wild differences between each of these practices only amplify the ineffectualness of looking at Kevin’s work from a single vantage point.

So maybe the word “body” is too solid; it connotes something to be understood as a whole. Kevin instead suggests a constellation, a grouping of individual acts which point to each other, and then come together in association. It’s not solely the artwork that an artist has grown, cultivated, and considered, but the people who bring themselves to it.

Without these receivers and responders, there are no alliances, perspectives, narratives, eyes, ears, or hands.

Kevin’s role as an artist does not relieve him of the responsibility of being an audience member, and I remember this as he ends a later performance at the Whitney Museum.

This time, Kevin had embedded microphones inside his sculptures.

He breathed into their negative spaces, rolled one, clutched another as he traced a circle on the gallery floor. After about forty minutes, in lieu of a bow and speedy exit as he usually does, he held up both hands as if in surrender and turned all the way around, making eye contact with each and every person in the audience, many of whom were colleagues and friends.

The lights are all on, and the artist and the audience should take a long look at each other.

We’re all going to be here for quite some time.

KEVIN BEASLEY

KEVIN BEASLEY Born 1985, Lynchburg, Virginia

EDUCATION 2012 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT 2007 BFA, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 Kevin Beasley, The Butcher’s Daughter, Detroit, MI 2012 Latency: A Collection of Works by Kevin Beasley, The Butcher’s Daughter, Ferndale, MI 2009 Found Asleep Underwater, ORG Contemporary, Detroit, MI 2008 Non/Places, Neal Davis Gallery, Royal Oak, MI GROUP EXHIBITIONS *Indicates performance 2014 *When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; *The 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; *Harold Ancart, Kevin Beasley, Mateo López, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY 2013 *Queens International 2013, Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY; Realization is Better Than Anticipation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; *6<<<>>> Part I, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY 2012 *Fore, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; *Some Sweet Day, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Thesis Part Two, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; An All Day Event, The End, Danspace, New York, NY 2011 PULSE Contemporary Art Fair Los Angeles, The Butcher’s Daughter, Los Angeles, CA; Live from Detroit, Fred Torres Collaborations, New York, NY; New Departures and Transitions, N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; College Art Association New York Area MFA Exhibition, Hunter College, New York, NY 2010 Paycheck to Paycheck, The Butcher’s Daughter, Ferndale, MI

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2009 Shameless Nameless Recycled, POP gallery Los Angeles, CA; Detroit: Breeding Ground, Museum of New Art (MoNA), Pontiac, MI; Kevin Beasley and Vanessa Merrill, MoNA, Pontiac, MI; Wellness: Film premier, Cave, Detroit, MI; Change: Its all There Already, University of Michigan art gallery, Detroit, MI 2008 This and There, Somewhere, Forum Gallery, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Andres Serrano Picks Detroit, Center Galleries, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI; Detroit-Toledo Exhibition, Secor Gallery/Detroit Industrial Projects, Toledo, OH; Still Moving, Cave, Detroit, MI; Michigan Fine Arts Competition, Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Birmingham, MI; Semester in Detroit Art Show, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 2007 Stag, Cave, Detroit, MI; Exhibiting Group Show, Detroit Industrial Projects, Detroit, MI; Black and White, Cave, Detroit, MI; Selections IX, Center Galleries, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI 2006 Even Clean Hands Leave Marks and Damage Surfaces, Detroit Industrial Projects, Detroit, MI; Selected Works by Deb Garlick and Kevin Beasley, Neal Davis Gallery, Royal Oak, MI; Black and White, Neal Davis Gallery, Royal Oak, MI *PERFORMANCES 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY, May 14, 16, 17; Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, April 26; And in My Dream I Was Rolling on the Floor, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, April 12; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. In conjunction with Sound Horizon curated by Jim Hodges, May 8; From Ashy to Classy Mix I (Valley of Ashes), Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY, November 17.

2013 …all different: for I do, I suppose, partake of multitude, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY, June 22, 2012; I Want My Spot Back, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY RESIDENCIES 2013 International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH

KEVIN BEASLEY

Bethany Collins

by Rujeko Hockley Contranym, noun—A word having opposite or contradictory meanings, as quiddity, oversight, sanction or cleave; also called Janus word, after the Roman god of beginnings and endings.

Language is not absolute. Meaning, pronunciation, usage, even words themselves—depending on where and when they’re used, and who uses them—change. Thus, in a way, dictionaries are archival objects. They collect what we say (and what we mean), and what we used to say, before.

Dictionaries are in flux, constantly added to and reworked, reflecting fads, technological innovations, changing mores, historical events and the incorporation (forced and voluntary) of different peoples and their wor(l)ds into new societies. In their pages, the

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residual, intimate and deeply subjective nature of language is revealed.

Yet, despite the constant reinforcement of this truth, we tend to want to believe otherwise. We want order and organization, analogous to the cool detachment of an alphabetized list.

We don’t want to accommodate new words or contradictory meanings; we don’t want to admit that the ground is unsteady and unpredictable, more so for some than for others.

Bethany Collins knows all of this—has known it. She uses it. She sifts through the dictionary-archive, selecting those words—those topics— that make us more squeamish, more desirous of fixity, and barring that, of escape. For the person that she is in the places she has been—black, white, and Southern—sometimes, as in her “Dictionaries” or “White Noise” series, these pertain to race. Sometimes, as in her “Contranyms” series,

BETHANY COLLINS

these pertain to language and its methods. Often, they pertain to both, albeit obliquely. What comes across is a sense that something is being withheld. Or that, perhaps, just before you walked into the room, some message that had been quickly scribbled down was just as quickly rubbed out.

The ghostly letters that remain, faintly coming together to form a complete sentence or thought, don’t quite care to be read. Do or don’t—you probably won’t get it, anyhow.

This refusal to play, to be read, is both beguiling and unnerving; it entices with one hand, as it rebuffs with the other. In the “Dictionaries” series, Collins chooses a word like “blue,” and then defines it not by its own dictionary entry, but by its listed associations. These words—“green, “indecent,” “livid,” “mariner,” “baleful,” “sailor,” “depressed,” “sea,” “puritanical,” “violet,” for example— are then defined for us, appearing greatly enlarged in stark black ink on crisp white paper. Reproduced by a multistep process of photo transfer, they constitute a narrative in and of themselves, building a story that may return us to “blue,” or may not. What can words say about color, anyway?

In contrast, in the “Contranyms” series she takes a different approach.

Attracted here by the notion of the contranym, a word that within itself contains contradictory meanings, she selects a contranym and a definition that is to her liking—“quiddity: a trifling distinction; quibble”—and then erases both the original word and the superfluous definitions, leaving us to

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parse meaning and intention.

What this means, more broadly, is that questions of legibility and translation are at the center of Collins’s practice. At times this central focus is expressed literally: in the “White Noise” series, what exactly do those looping lines of smudged cursive say? What are those scattered clusters of letters?

Squint a little and turn your head to the side and the letters float out as if forming a constellation: “Too black to be white.” “Too white to be black.” “Maybe you should make it a slave ship.” Other times it is more philosophical: in the “Contranym” series, why is this definition left while those others are aggressively erased, the very pulp and fiber of the paper itself curling outwards, becoming three-dimensional through the physical act of Collins’s vigorously erasing hand? (Piled mounds of eraser shavings, oddly compelling, are a testament to this vigor.) She says that she is attracted to the “unnerving possibility of multiple meanings, dual perceptions and limitlessness in the seemingly binary.” Making this attraction tangible, she worries her chosen words and phrases—writing and erasing, writing and erasing, writing and erasing. She does this until both meaning and vision blur; until the words are just marks on a surface, evacuated of content; until that content comes rushing suddenly back.

By this repetitive and palimpsest-like process, she creates drawing out of writing, abstraction out of representation, possibility out of narrowness.

BETHANY COLLINS

Studio view

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Photo by Adam Reich

BETHANY COLLINS

Positive Obsession, 2014

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BETHANY COLLINS

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BETHANY COLLINS

Scary, 1953, 2013

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BETHANY COLLINS

Studio views

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Photos by Adam Reich

BETHANY COLLINS

BETHANY COLLINS Born 1984, Montgomery, Alabama

2011

EDUCATION 2012 MFA, G eorgia State University, Atlanta, GA 2007 BA, University of Alabama, AL SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2012 (Unrelated), Ernest G. Welch Gallery, Atlanta, GA 2011 To Be Real, Arts Exchange Gallery, Atlanta, GA SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2014 See Through Walls, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; Point of View: African American Art from the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Collection, Flint Institute of Art, Flint, MI; INCOGNITO 2014, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Space for Possibility, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; Emerging Artists Exhibition, Museum of Arts & Sciences, Macon, GA 2013 Drawing Inside the Perimeter, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Intersections of Gender & Place, Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, MS; E-MERGE, Harstfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Atlanta, GA; Outdated, Kibbee Gallery, Atlanta, GA; ONE ONE, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA; Boom City, Dashboard Co-Op, MRich Building, Atlanta, GA; Art Papers Auction, Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA 2012 Imaginary Million, 200 Peachtree, Atlanta, GA; ‘Merica, Kibbee Gallery, Atlanta, GA; From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again, Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Talent Loves Company, Barbara Archer Gallery, Atlanta, GA; BLOOM, Kai Lin Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA

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2010

2009 2008 2004

Pre-Emergent, Aqua Art Miami Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, FL; 11.11.11, Arts Exchange, Atlanta, GA; Pulp, Beta Pictoris Gallery, Birmingham, AL; Pride & Prejudice, Archetype Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Bring It, Landmark Arts, Lubbock, TX Southern Art?, Ernest G. Welch Gallery, Atlanta, GA; America, Mint Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Cultural Competency Exhibition, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA The Blotter Show, Kibbee Gallery, Atlanta, GA Arte Vivo, Centro de Diseño Alemán, Mexico City, Mexico Artwalk, Space One Eleven, Birmingham, AL

GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS & RESIDENCIES 2014 Creative Loafing, Best Emerging Artist, Atlanta, GA 2013 The Drawing Center Viewing Program, New York, NY; Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences Residency, Rabun Gap, GA; WonderRoot Arts Center, Ossabaw Island Residency, Atlanta, GA; Fulton County Public Art Program, Public Art Registry Artist, Atlanta, GA; WonderRoot Arts Center, CSA Artist, Atlanta, GA 2012 Swan Coach House Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Nominee, Atlanta, GA; Dashboard Co-Op Artist, Atlanta, GA; Walthall Artist Fellowship, WonderRoot Arts Center, Atlanta, GA 2010 Dedalus Foundation Grant Nominee; Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Director’s Award; Arquetopia, Artist in Residence, Puebla, Mexico 2009 Dana Foundation Rural Teaching Artist Training Program, Montgomery, AL 2007 Chaffin & Catto Scholarship to Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, CO; Rural Alabama Initiative, Artist in Residence, Elba, AL

BETHANY COLLINS

Abigail DeVille THAT WHICH SINGS AND CONTEMPLATES IN YOU

by Nico Wheadon Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch it’s flowing.

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness, and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.1 —Khalil Gibran, The Prophet Building upon the Big Bang theory as a cosmological model for the origins of the universe, Abigail DeVille further explores the interconnectivity of matter and the spatiotemporal

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confines that limit our understandings of the physical world. DeVille straddles the fertile expanse between archeology and futurology, excavating the ephemera of pasts buried or forgotten to resituate them within new contexts. DeVille’s site-specific works recycle the histories inscribed on our sociocultural detritus to discuss the human condition and the future of modern society. Her immersive, bricolage installations are all at once Gibran’s streams and banks, sites of progressive movement and respites for meditation.

DeVille’s unique aesthetic visualizes elements of Afrofuturism and gives shape to contemporary discourse surrounding notions of race, space and place. Channeling the poetic curiosity that drives Octavia Butler’s literary observations of society and culture, and the soul animating the musical riffs of

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

George Clinton and Sun Ra, DeVille’s itinerant works sing as much as they contemplate. Works like Harlem Flag (2014) 2 —pieced together from discarded clothing, collected debris, and local heirlooms—deconstruct issues affecting people of color, historically and today right here in Harlem.

DeVille uses rubbings of local streets to create the rich texture of the flag’s fabric, and mines Harlem’s collective memory to unearth the relics of shared importance that adorn it.

By staging familiar objects in new settings, DeVille forces us to confront the stereotypes, behaviors, and memories we attach to concrete forms. Furthermore, she stages this confrontation within a greater unraveling of mainstream aesthetics, inviting beauty to shine through in the sheer essence of materials, scavenged from dusty attics, trash heaps and wastelands. DeVille’s Street Work (2014) 3 is a series of public sculptures assembled from discarded materials that evolve in reaction to the community’s engagement with them, embodying the transmutation that some theorists assert occurs through sheer observation of the material world.

Deville agrees, saying, “Everything is connected. In Quantum Mechanics, the observation of a subatomic particle changes it. You can never really be sure if it even existed before you looked at it. Since you looked, you actually interfered with whatever was before. We affect everything around us just by how we see it or what we believe. In drawing, cutting

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and smashing materials to an altered state, I hope to talk to a larger question of time, the time we live in and reoccurring societal problems, all the way back to the beginning of everything.”4 Through characterizing the spatial and temporal links that bind subjects and objects in eternal rotation, DeVille’s works investigate how human attention and behavior can change the universe on a spectrum of scales.

Through shifting perspectives and positioning viewers as co-authors to her own observations of the physical world, DeVille paves the way for a new genre of storytelling and model for engaging the collective imagination. Science Fiction writer David Wyatt asserts, “Speculative fiction is a term which includes all literature that takes place in a universe slightly different from our own. In all its forms, it gives authors the ability to ask relevant questions about one’s own society in a way that would prove provocative in more mainstream forms…it is a literature of freedom, freedom for the author to lose the chains of conventional thought, and freedom for the reader to lose themselves in discovery.”5 Speculative fiction challenges the status quo and democratizes access to free thinking, opening up inquisitive space in which cultural critics such as DeVille can investigate the social responsibilities that parallel this autonomy. In said space, DeVille challenges the legitimacy of the histories we’ve been taught and asserts that all facts are fiction and the only truth lies in the

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

lifecycles of objects.

It is in DeVille’s handling of her own personal history that this suspension of disbelief materializes and we are able to witness the interconnectivity of all matter in human terms. She recalls, “In 2009, I discovered through Google and interlibrary loan that my maternal grandfather, Francisco Antonio Cruz, had written multiple books of poetry before his death. In translating his poetry, I found that he was writing about the infinite and the cosmos, a discovery that happened after I had already begun thinking about the structure of my work in relation to supernovae and black holes. When I was a child, my parents said that I drew pictures with my finger in the air and I never told them what I was drawing. I was drawing my grandfather’s face, invisible pictures of a man deeply concerned with the infinite. I was animating an unspoken history of my own.”6 What resonates here is the presence of forces beyond human cognition, memory and language that bind us to the otherworldly; DeVille’s shared theology with a man she’d barely met and could only describe through gesture, is only comprehensible in a world where all matter is finite and the lifecycle of this matter is dynamic and limitless.

Inspired greatly by her grandmother—a dynamic fixture of her Bronx neighborhood known for collecting and transforming neighbors’ discarded belongings—DeVille translates the act of collecting into not only a tool of sociocultural

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archiving, but also one of self discovery and explorations of otherness.

Travelling through the dark wormholes forged in DeVille’s works, we are first introduced to the versions of our past selves we know all too well and called to atone for the attitudes and behaviors that have come to define us as a society. Once we’ve come to terms with our incalculable position along the vast timeline between creation and extinction, we are drawn deeper still, past the familiar, to a light on the other side that reflects the future selves we have yet to meet.

1 Gibran, Khalil. The Prophet, pg 68.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York. 1923.

2 Harlem Flag, 2014, discarded clothing, tape, paint, zip ties, paper, collected debris, heirlooms, dimensions variable.

3 Street (work), 2014, discarded materials, mannequin parts, paper, Harlem heirlooms, dimensions variable.

4 Interview with the artist in her studio, April 2014.

5 Wyatt, David. Context Science Fiction Blog, “Speculative Fiction”, 2007: www.contextsf.org/blog/2007/12/ speculative-fiction.html 6 Interview with the artist in her studio, April 2014.

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

ABIGAIL DEVILLE Born 1981, New York, New York 2010 Education 2011 MFA, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT 2007 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME 2007 BFA, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY Selected Exhibitions 2014 Home, Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York; Sensitive Instruments, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; Rites of Spring, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX 2013 Guts, Abrons Art Center, Henry Street Settlement, New York, NY; Black in the Abstract, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX; Invisible Men: Beyond the Veil, Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, France; Gastown Follies, Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Who Wants Flowers When You’re Dead?, The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, WI; Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Future Generation Prize Exhibition, The 55th Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy; They might as well have been remnants of the boat, Calder Foundation, NY; XXXXXXX, Iceberg Projects, Rogers Park, Chicago, IL; Njideka Akunyili & Abigail DeVille: New Paintings, Gallery Zidoun, Luxembourg.

2012 Fore, Studio Museum, New York, NY; Future Generation Prize Exhibition, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine; Space Invaders, Lehman College Gallery, Bronx, NY; If I don’t think I’m sinking, look what a hole I’m in, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; First Among Equals, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Invisibility Blues II, M55 Gallery, Long Island City, NY; Invisibility Blues, Recess Gallery, The Dependent Art Fair, New York, NY; The Ungovernables, The New Museum Triennial, New York, NY 2011 Bosh Young Talent Show, Stedelijk Museum, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; The (S) Files 2011, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Un-nameable Frame, MFA 2011 Thesis

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2009

2008 2007

2006

Exhibition, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; Reflecting Abstraction, Vogt Gallery, New York, NY Bonzai, Red Lotus Room, Brooklyn, NY; Planet of Slums, Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Dark Star, Recess Gallery, New York, NY; Critical Perspectives, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; Gold Mountain, Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, PA; Rompe Puesto, The Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY How the Other Half Lives, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; A proposito: Pan Latino Dialogues, Ely House, New Haven, CT; The Open, Deitch Studios, New York, NY; Black Gold, The Bronx River Art Center.

Bronx, NY Bronx Council of the Arts Open Studio Tour, Haven Gallery, Bronx, NY The Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY; DK Magazine, Pro qm, Berlin, Germany; Fine Arts BFA 2007 Thesis Exhibition, The Museum at FIT, New York, NY; CAA & NYCAMS BFA Exhibition, New York Center for Art & Media Studies, New York, NY Selections 2006, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY; ArtStar, Deitch Projects, New York, NY

Grants, Fellowships & Residencies 2014 The Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study Fellowship, Cambridge, MA 2012 The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, New York, NY; Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; LMCC Swing Space Resident Governors Island, New York, NY; Recess in Red Hook, Artist in Residence, Brooklyn, NY; The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust, International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn NY 2011 Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT 2007 Camille Hanks Cosby Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine 2005 The Frank Shapiro Memorial Award 2005 for Excellence in Fine Arts

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

Intersection, 2014

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Photo by Hao Bai

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

Intersection, 2014

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Photo by Hao Bai

ABIGAIL DEVILLE

Negation: Dusk to Dust, 2013

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ABIGAIL DEVILLE

Subjugation, 2013

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ABIGAIL DEVILLE