27 December 2022
27 December 2022
Join artist Devan Shimoyama in a timely conversation with Artistic Director and Curator of Untitled Art, Omar López Chahoud. The talk will cover Shimoyama’s current series, "The Tarot," paintings from which will be on view at De Buck Gallery. In Devan Shimoyama’s Tarot series, the artist takes inspiration from the centuries-old divination practice of card reading. For Shimoyama, the Tarot represents how we look to mystical practices to help sustain ourselves through difficult times.
About Devan Shimoyama
Devan Shimoyama is a Philadelphia-born visual artist whose works investigate the politics of queer culture using the male form. Inspired by mythology and allegory, Shimoyama depicts the Black queer male body as something that is both desirable and desirous while contemplating the relationship between celebration and silence in queer culture. His use of lustrous materials such as costume jewelry, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins masterly captures the beauty and alienation of these forms by defying and questioning Black masculinity. Shimoyama was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and graduated from Penn State University in 2011 with a BFA in Drawing/Painting. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in Painting/Printmaking in 2014. While there, in 2013, he was awarded the Al Held Fellowship. Devan Shimoyama’s work has been exhibited around the world. His solo exhibition Cry, Baby, at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, in 2018 placed his paintings in dialogue with a selection of Warhol’s portraits of drag queens, giving new agency to Warhol’s subjects and continuing the conversation on sexuality, race, and queer performance. Shimoyama’s works have also been included in the following exhibitions: Make-Believe, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC; All the Rage, Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany; When We See Us, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Curated by Alexandra Schwartz, Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; Elegies: Still Lifes in Contemporary Art, Curated by Monique Long, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Oh Gods of Dust and Rainbows, FRONT International Triennial, Cleveland, OH 2021; Futures, The Smithsonian Institution, Arts + Industries, Washington, D.C., VA; Fictions, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
About Omar López Chahoud
Omar López-Chahoud has been the Artistic Director and Curator of Untitled Art since its founding in 2012. As an independent curator, López-Chahoud has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally. Most recently, he curated the Nicaraguan Biennial in March 2014. López-Chahoud has participated in curatorial panel discussions at Artists' Space, Art in General, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. López-Chahoud earned MFAs from Yale University School of Art, and the Royal Academy of Art in London.
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