ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾

On June 29^th, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art will open Abigail DeVille: In the Fullness of Time. The artist recently took time to speak about the exhibition with student interns, Axel Romell and Zoë Pringle. The following transcript of their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Axel Romell [AR]: Welcome to ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾. Thank you for your time. Could you tell us what kinds of history you are exploring here at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾?

Abigail DeVille [AD]: I have been thinking about what would be meaningful for me in engaging with this institution. What are the kinds of lasting ideals that have been transferred from generation to generation? I got caught up in looking at the original collection of objects that James ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ III gave to the museum and thinking about the “invention of America.” What were the ideals that were instilled? What does it even mean to get a higher education?

When I was the halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist in Residence last spring [2023], people would tell me about the 19th-century superstars that graduated from here. But we're in the twenty-first century. Is that the identity of the institution? There's a romanticized kind of way in which this place envisions itself in the world, and we already know that underneath the layer of everything, there's always something else that's going on. I think maybe through isolating particular works in the collection I can get at thinking about what it means to have a “classical education” or understanding what that even means and possibly the colonial framework that may underlie that. There's a book about James ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ that praises him for being a “man of his age,” like Benjamin Franklin, a self-made, renaissance-man. Men like this expressed their genius, but it’s because of their position of birth, wealth, and privilege, that they were able to carve out time for intellectual inquiry. 

These are the things that I've been thinking about. How is taste made or shaped? Why are these objects here versus others? The kinds of objects this museum has, as a small institution, are remarkable.

Zoë Pringle [ZP]: In a discussion with the Bronx Museum about Abigail DeVille:Bronx Heavens, out of which your exhibition at the BCMA grows, you said the practice of using found objects and detritus—or “trash”—in your work “honors your ancestors with the material of the now.” How do you find lost histories? What does that process look like?

AD: In terms of material, the object itself already has information embedded in it from the moment it was made: who it was made by, who it was made for, who could afford it, who discarded it. Was it loved? What is the used patina on it? Where did I find it? I know when I pick something up whether I want to use it or not. And then I reframe it in a different composition or different place. So when somebody comes into the gallery, not expecting to see this particular object, but finds that it has a childhood association for them, they instantly connect with it in a way that couldn't have been planned.

So called “trash”—material waste—is the archeological evidence of now. It’s what people hundreds of years from now will study in terms of our consumption. This type of refuse tells more about us than the things that we prize or hold dear, or even the funky old ideas that we won't let go.

AR: As you engage with your family history in your work, especially regarding the Great Migration and immigration, does the distinct collapse of time and space in your work relate to the African diaspora and histories of cultural genocide and assimilation in the Americas?

AD: Well I think to be here and to exist for centuries without knowing when your people first got here makes you realize that everything is a complete construction. Even being “American.” Most people can't name their great-great-grandmother. It doesn't matter where they came from or when they got here. Within two, three generations, nobody speaks their “mother-tongue” anymore. There's this run to assimilate, and a strange erasure because of this color system. To be White is the top of the ladder, but nobody is actually white. In this oversimplification and categorization, everybody loses. The ways that people identify or conceive of themselves is diminished and compressed. You don't even know what you’ve lost. That's why most people are lost.

There's a beautiful essay that bell hooks wrote about the disconnection between people and land. She talks about how what has gone unstudied during the Great Migration is the final severing of the connection of people to the land. Say you were from a tribe in West Africa that specifically grew rice, and your people were taken to grow rice in South Carolina, 300 years ago. And then in 1915, somebody gets on a train and goes to some city. Two generations later, nobody knows anybody in South Carolina anymore. Imagine you're now in a cramped urban space, working some dead end job. You thought things would be better here. Things aren't better here. It calls into question a system of values that was manufactured and propagated in the twentieth century about [the] “American Dream” and white picket fence nonsense.

I don't want to talk about myself too much, but I have an unusual circumstance where my maternal and paternal grandfathers were orphaned. So growing up, because my mother is not close to her side of the family, I only had my Dad's side of the family. It was a very small African-American family, and once the people left Richmond, Virginia, the never went back there. I know because of DNA testing that I have cousins in Virginia. I don't know who these people are. We've sent little messages back and forth, but that's where it ends.

That’s the birth of the questioning process in me. Most of my family has died off at this point, so there's nobody I can turn to with my questions. Nobody knew anything while they were alive anyway. This is probably everybody's circumstance. We don't know anything, and we should be asking questions about everything.

ZP: [In] thinking about that same interview you did for Bronx Heavens, you talked about how we're “forced to compartmentalize every day,” both mentally and environmentally. You can feel that in Mirror, Mirror … (2011), Whole (2010), and Named Names (scaffold), 2022. Is capturing that sense of “compression” growing out of the questioning process that you described, or is it part of expanding these stories that aren't readily available? How does that work in your artistic process?

AD: I think about values, information, and record keeping. In this institution there's a systematized way of learning, and ingesting information. But there's a lot of information that you absorbed growing up that goes unacknowledged in the hierarchies of understanding. I really value experiential knowledge. There's something an object has embedded within it. I may not fully understand why yet, but there's a reason that I'm drawn to it.

Named Names is about how can I gesture to histories that I will never know or understand and all of these people whose names have been forgotten in the dustbin of history. That's why it's called Named Names. I don't have any specific names, but I'm going to acknowledge the history that is being overlooked.

Whole, is trying to reconcile the spatial relationship of cramped apartments and urban living. My family lived in a New York City housing project apartment, almost the exact same apartment for at least forty years and the same projects for fifty years. Historically, these spaces are incredibly small, but then you compare this to the infinite expanse of the universe. Ninety-seven percent of our bodies are made up of the same elements that are found in the stars. Those same elements [are there] when we look up at the night sky. We're looking at ancient versions of ourselves. But for some reason, we live in these boxes that are continually constructed for us to check off and limit our thinking. How do you recognize that these constructs are not real?

A friend of mine recently sent me this article where a photographer, whose father died suddenly in Mexico, wanted to see what his ashes looked like under a microscope. So she looked at her father's ashes under a very high-powered microscope, and it looked like the cosmos. If that's where we started and that's how we end up, then what is this time in between? We are that, but we're constantly told that we're not that. How can we be that consciously and embrace an infinite potential?

ZP: Contradiction and liminality is present in much of your work, like “Dark Matter, No Matter.” Many marginalized communities exist in a suspended state of being, a liminal social space, If you will. By this, I refer to precarious and tenuous social conditions produced by institutional racism. In your process, do you care about how others interact with your art? Do you think that that has meaning or is it the way that you attempt to understand what these objects mean?

AD:  Maybe we're all in suspended states of being. We're all on the way to becoming something else. We're all in a constant state of flux. But there’s this rigid, systematized way of thinking: Are you this or are you that? Define who you are now and be sure about it. What team are you on?

There’s a beautiful observation by Maya Angelou, which I'll paraphrase, about how "African-Americans really had to study white people's smiles, tones, behavior because their lives depended upon it. So there's a distinct immediate understanding of a tonal shift or what a grimace or a smile genuinely is, but studied in a way that African-American behavior has gone wholly unstudied." And I would say that that’s true about most people that have been regulated to the outskirts of the center of power. I think Black Americans unfortunately have the distinction of being in an invention of America, whereas indigenous people were here for 10,000 years before Europeans arrived and have ties to the land and deeply embedded cultural practices and language. It's a collage. Your DNA is a collage, your cultural practices and understanding of self. Everything is a collage. If you think about the continent of Africa and the numerous tribes that originated there, they didn’t think of themselves as a color. That is something that has been specifically manufactured here as a way to control behavior, as a way to control a group of people.

ZP: How how does the audience factor into your process for creating art?

AD: I think about the audience more than anything else. I want people to be moved by the work. I don't want it to be a self-help practice. I'm not degrading that, but I feel like the purpose of art or the way or why artists make art in the first place is that they want to have a conversation. And you want to have a conversation with civilizations, right? Past, present, and future simultaneously.

This cultural artifact you’re making is a time capsule. It is a reflection of the time in which it was made. It reveals, within the making, material choices or techniques, the values of the society that produced it. It's an active engagement with time. I endeavor to do it because I'm alive. I'm here now and I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for the past. I'm speaking for the future. I'm telling the things that I want people in the future to know. All these materials that poured into me to make that particular piece in that particular moment, is a reflection and compression of time. It's me speaking out to the cosmos. Even if all of the work is destroyed in 75 years, it existed in that time and place and people interacted with it.

Art is also seed planting. It may not be a radical protest, but it's a little bomb. It’s something you can plant in somebody's imagination, a catalyst for change in someone's thinking process. That's the most intimate thing. When you're reading a text, you're hearing that person's voice in your head. Somebody is penetrating your thought life. That's going to shape the way that you see yourself or the world. And it all started with the germination of a seed. It could have been a word, something that you read, or hopefully, an artwork that you encountered that left an impression on you.

AR: What is the process of finishing an artwork like? Do you feel a sense of responsibility when claiming that a piece is finished?

AD: Usually it's because a deadline means there's no more time to work on it. And so that's when it's finished. But it may never really be finished. And most of the time when I first make something, I don't know how to talk about it for a while, and I may not even like it for years. I'm a little suspicious. You know?

AR: Where do you think that suspicion comes from?

AD: I think when it comes easy.

AR: Could that be from a sense of responsibility do you think?

AD: It could be. I like things difficult, so, if it comes very quickly, then I think, “I don't know about this.” But I don't know. I think viewers are either going to like something or they're going to hate something. But if it makes them upset then you penetrated something, right? You got in there somewhere.

ZP: On that note, is there anybody recently or in critical periods of your life that have kind of planted those seeds or penetrated your thought life in that way? You have mentioned bell hooks, Maya Angelou, and W. E. B. Du Bois as sources of inspiration. Are there others who are significant in your becoming an artist or who you are now?

AD: I'd say my friends over the last 15 years. After I finished my undergraduate training I went to an artist residency at Skowhegan. That really changed my life, because before that, I didn't have any artist friends. So then once you have a cohort of people who are also exceptional artists, and they're holding themselves to a particular standard, you end up getting pulled along with that. It’s intoxicating. So I feel like the conversations that I've had with many of my friends have been a grounding point. My family has been really supportive. But you really need, outside of family, friends who are going to propel you into the future, who are going to recognize who you are and maybe even see things that you can't see yet about yourself and help you kind of along your way.

Hands down, I will give some props to LaToya Ruby Frazier. We were at Skowhegan together, and she's so exacting and so precise. It's almost like... I want to say superhuman in terms of the way that she approaches making work and her commitment to communities and photography.

I also feel like, important to have friends that have different disciplinary backgrounds, because people are always thinking about works in different ways.

ZP: Do you think that sort of recognition from your friends or people close to you is sort of a grounding force in the state of flux?

AD: Yes, a grounding force in the state of flux. The thing I think I try to be mindful of as much as possible is gratitude. I think about the people that weren’t able to do the things that I'm able to do. Being in the twenty-first century as a Black woman that grew up in the Bronx the fact that I get to be an artist is insane.

Faith Ringgold, rest in peace, just passed away. She didn't have her first retrospective show in the city of New York until a couple years ago, at the New Museum. But she has a clear history of protesting these institutions and calling them out for their racism in the '60s and '70s. Ringgold said the first time that she was called the N-word was outside of the Whitney Museum, while protesting because a Black artist had never had a solo show at the museum. The Whitney Museum gave the first solo show to a Black artist at the museum, Al Loving, in 1969. Switching to another institution, the Guggenheim gave the first Black woman, Carrie Mae Weems, a retrospective in 2014. This is the state of things. It's still a hot mess. So I think about that fact that I'm able to do this because of all these people who did this before me. I mean, we're 160 years removed from slavery and there's still lots of fights that need to be fought, but I'm very grateful. I'm profoundly grateful. And I try to think about all the time.

PBS recently did a documentary on Augusta Savage, that I recommend everybody watch. Savage came from Florida to New York City as a widow with her child. She left her child behind in Florida and went to Cooper Union. She worked as a laundress, and graduated in three years, [but] because of her race and gender, she was unable to show work anywhere. So, she opened a school in Harlem, where she fostered a generation of talented artists, including Jacob Lawrence. She only made about 170 works in her life, seventy of them are missing. If you have a good support system, you can make 160 works in two years. The few works we do have of hers are phenomenal. But, she poured so much into other people because there were so many doors that were shut to her.

Some people just keep going. They're not bitter. There’s an energy transfer. ‘It's not going to happen for me, but I'm going to make sure that it happens for you.’ Being an artist is a very self-centered existence, but it is always not about you. It's never about you.

AR: Is there anything you want to talk about before we close, anything we should know about what is to come?

AD: No, I said enough. I'm excited about the piece I'm making for the exhibition at the BCMA, The Miser's Heart (yo so oro)* (2024), but we'll see what happens.

AR: We're very excited too.

 

*The Miser's Heart (yo so oro) is a working title.