“Engaging with the detritus of our lived surroundings, Abigail DeVille examines the power structures that are inherent to historical narratives, monuments, and cities to chart a path toward liberation.” – juror Alison Coplan, Chief Curator, Swiss Institute.

“Abigail DeVille’s expansive works insist that artists and artworks can—and should—exist in public: reclaiming parks and plazas not just as sites of visibility, but as spaces for reckoning, memory, gathering, and radical imagination. Her critical and ongoing research into the past, present, and future of monuments unspools in multiple collaborative forms—sculpture and procession, sound and storytelling—creating works that take up space, provoke active encounters, and look society in the eye to demand that our cultural spaces, both physical and symbolic, remain porous to collective action, historical contradictions, and the capacity for change.” – juror Vic Brooks, Independent Curator

Abigail DeVille (b. 1981, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific installations, which engage with the material and lived memory of communities and the land from which they emerge. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Future is Present; The Harbinger is Home at Prospect 6, New Orleans, LA (2024); In the Fullness of Time at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME (2024); In the fullness of time, the heart speaks truths too deep for utterance, but a star remembers at JTT Gallery, NYC (2023); Original Night at Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC (2022–23); Bronx Heavens at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2022–23); and the traveling exhibition Light of Freedom (2020–24). She holds an MFA from Yale University and has received numerous honors, including the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a 2015 Creative Capital Grant, the 2015 Obie Award for Design, and fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Rome, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

DeVille’s practice is rooted in James Baldwin’s idea that the artist’s role is to reveal personal and societal truth, as a lover reveals the beloved to themself. To interrogate our future past, DeVille explores what it means to love and tell the truth by investigating historical fragments and contemporary material waste. By referencing ancient Greco-Roman architecture and employing the metaphor of black holes, DeVille examines the erasure of history and the spiritous gravitational pull of eviscerated truths, creating portals that challenge our understanding of time and the foundations of power.