Abigail DeVille

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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 her work. She explores 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 a constitutional value and personal liberation.

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

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 winner for Design, 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.

During her Hodder Fellowship, DeVille will conduct an in-depth investigation of the site-specific practice she has developed over the past thirteen years. She will work on publishing a book that highlights key installations, communities, and local histories engaged at specific sites, engaging critically with an extended look at art history forebears and American ideologies and mythologies.