The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University presents the heart knows its own bitterness (Manifest), an exhibition of work by 2024-25 Princeton Hodder Fellow Abigail DeVille. Combining sculpture, video, assemblage, and installation, the work is inspired by a series of public shipping manifests filed in New Orleans in 1807-1860, documents that track the arrival of more than 100,000 people sold into slavery. The exhibition is on view in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex November 11 through January 9 with an opening reception on November 11 at 4:30 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public weekdays from 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and weekends from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (closed November 27-28 and December 20-January 4). The gallery is an accessible venue. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.

Working between sculpture, video, assemblage, and installation, the Bronx-based artist’s practice is one of site-specificity. The site itself can take many forms, from which the artist re-situates forgotten or erased narratives within broader historical timescales.

the heart knows its own bitterness (Manifest) consists of four anatomical heart-shaped sculptures. The work takes as its point of departure that series of New Orleans shipping manifests, documents that track the arrival of approximately 135,000 people sold into slavery in the largest slave market in the Deep South. The manifests are recorded on 30 rolls of microfilm and accessible through the U.S. Customs Service. They list the names, ages, and physical traits of the people forced aboard the ships, which are read aloud in the sound pieces that accompany each sculpture. The sound pieces combine singing, instruments, and environmental and bodily noises. DeVille collaborated with artist Justin Hicks for this element of the exhibition, who vocally explored the sounds of a healthy heart based on consultation with a heart specialist. In probing this open archive, DeVille unveils the violence of such indexical representation and the collapsed complexity of its subjects but also challenges the misapprehension that the lives of enslaved people are lost to history. Rather, she notes, their stories are simply hidden in plain sight, though often relegated to a space of subliminal darkness.

One of the works that will be included in Abigail’s DeVille’s exhibition, the heart knows its own bitterness (Manifest).

Black holes, voids, and porous boundaries often figure into DeVille’s work. They embody the continuous processes of making and unmaking from which all things form, and from which history is written. As noted in Jane Ursula Harris’ article “Fault Lines: Abigail DeVille Interviewed” in BOMB Magazine, June 14, 2021: “America has numerous black holes in which it tries unsuccessfully to bury the bodies of its many democratic operatives,” the artist has reflected. “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.” In its metaphysical dimensions, DeVille states that the black hole marks an absence of light, but even here, in this liminal space, time continues to unfold. For the artist, a black hole—an abstraction of an opening, an aperture, or an ellipse—represents a space of persistent misrecognition from which a veiled subject might emerge.

DeVille’s materials often speak to the intangibility of historical narratives. For the heart knows, the artist was particularly drawn to coal, which primarily consists of carbon, one of the most ubiquitous elements on the planet, and from which all matter emanates and returns. Each coal-coated sculpture varies in dimension, approximately corresponding to that of a human body at different life stages. The structures house glass bottles stuffed with manifests, slightly visible only through the porous exterior. In drawing on the material ecology of carbon—a timekeeper, a relic, a capsule that transcends temporality—the heart knows memorializes erased histories of Black subjects, poetically operating at a similar threshold of liminal visibility.

DeVille’s work suggests that if the written record doesn’t capture our histories, then a new visual language must be written. Symbols of nationhood and identity can similarly be rewritten, or bear alternating meanings across time and space, she notes. The felt experience of diaspora may conceal certain narratives from official histories, but, as DeVille unveils, these narratives can be uncovered, if one only knows where to look.

DeVille’s most recent solo exhibitions include Prospect 6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home, New Orleans (2024); In the Fullness of Time, Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine (2024); In the fullness of time, the heart speaks truths too deep for utterance, but a star remembers. at JTT gallery in New York City (2023); Original Night at Eric Firestone Gallery (2022-23); Bronx Heavens at Bronx Museum of the Arts (2022-23); Light of Freedom, organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy (2020-21), which traveled to the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (2021), the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (2021-22), and Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio (2023-24); The American Future, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon (2018-19); Lift Every Voice and Sing (amerikanskie gorki) at Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (2017-2018); and Empire State Works in Progress (2017) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

DeVille was a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award recipient, a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, a 2017-2018 Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a 2015 Obie Award for Design winner, a 2015 Creative Capital grantee, a 2014-15 fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, a 2013-14 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and a 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. She is a recipient of the 2025 New York City Artadia Award.

During her recent year as a Hodder Fellow, DeVille has been conducting an in-depth investigation of the site-specific practice she has developed over the past 13 years, hoping to have a book published highlighting key installations, communities, and local histories engaged at specific sites.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.