Abigail DeVille USA, b. 1981

Abigail DeVille is an American artist known for her large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations, which incorporate objects, materials, and narrative elements native to the site where the work manifests.

The depth and ingenuity of DeVille's work is a reflection of the artist's exhaustive historical research and disciplined approach to fostering an intertextual understanding of the role art plays in the everyday life of communities. DeVille’s works are meticulously crafted, elegant, abstract, undeniably dramatic, and nuanced in their many layers of meaning.

DeVille's work is keenly attuned to the optimism and endurance embedded within the ongoing struggles of African American communities. She perceives "lost voices" within her materials, and deploys the art of assemblage as a medium through which to reanimate these voices, and amplify their reach.

"America has numerous black holes in which it tries unsuccessfully to bury the bodies of its many democratic operatives,” DeVille says. “I use black holes as a loose metaphor for historical erasure. Black holes eviscerate matter, but the gravity of the matter remains to be discovered, interrogated, and recognized."

DeVille's work has been the subject of an Art21 documentary, and has been the subject of exhibitions at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev; New Museum, NY; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. She has been a Creative Capital grantee, was nominated for The Future Generation Art Prize in the 55th Biennale di Venezia, and was artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2017-2018. Her work is in the permanent collections of Pinault; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Kadist Art Foundation; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Studio Museum Harlem; and Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, among others. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and is a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University New York MFA program.