Abigail DeVille

Abigail DeVille

Artist, Site-Specific Immersive Installations

Abigail DeVille, FAAR, was born in 1981 in New York, where she lives and works. Maintaining a long-standing interest in marginalized people and places, DeVille creates site-specific immersive installations designed to bring attention to these forgotten stories, such as with the sculpture she built on the site of a former African American burial ground in Harlem.

Deville creates part-archaic, part-Afrofuturist sculptures and installations using rubbish and found objects, such as the wooden door and four brooms that make up Talismán, continuing the tradition of assemblage developed in the United States and Europe. For DeVille, history is recorded in these objects – which are often items from everyday life – that are the receptacles of lost voices. 

DeVille’s work has been exhibited at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (St Louis), Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), the Pinchuk Art Centre (Kiev), New Museum (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). DeVille has designed sets for theatrical productions—at venues such as the Stratford Festival, directed by Peter Sellers, Harlem Stage, La Mama, JACK, and Joe’s Pub directed by Charlotte Brathwaite. She has received honors fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Creative Capital grantee, received a OBIE Award for design, and nomiated for The Future Generation Art Prize in 55th Biennale di Venezia. She was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2017-2018. 

Her work is part of prestigious collections as Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco), Kaviar Factory (Henningsvaer), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx), The Studio Museum (Harlem), Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris), among others.

Deville teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore), and she’s a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art (New Haven) and Columbia University MFA program (New-York). She received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the New York Fashion Institute of Technology.