Devan Shimoyama: Exploring the “Self” in Self-Portraiture
Featured in the Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby exhibition catalogue
Essay Excerpt:
The body is where I reside; a home; it’s me, but it’s also a shell, which I care for and tend to ... My work isn’t hyper-sexual, but more about knowing and loving oneself.—Devan Shimoyama
I always marvel at the ways in which nonwhite children survive a white supremacist US culture that preys on them. I am equally in awe of the ways in which queer children navigate a homophobic public sphere that would rather they did not exist. The survival of children who are both queerly and racially identified is nothing short of staggering. —José Esteban Muñoz
“Devan Shimoyama’s world is complex and imaginative, filled with enchanted landscapes, moonlit forests, and a queer imagining of the African American barbershop. In these fantasy spaces, Shimoyama’s figures are permitted to act freely: they are staged as feminine myths, delight in fields of butterflies and flowers, and cry tears of sorrow, tears of resilience. Densely layered with symbols of danger, beauty, pain, and joy, Devan Shimoyama’s paintings, though almost entirely self-portraits, are hard to define. His figures are African American, but they are rarely painted with black; they are young boys, but do not embody a typical form of masculinity; they are overtaken with tears of sorrow, but are not oppressed. The figures in his paintings refuse to sit still. They are restless and eager to find a space of acceptance.
In the utopian space of Shimoyama’s paintings, race is reconstructed, and gender is twisted as male figures are rendered with feminine details. At times, the eyes of the artist’s mother or the slender fingers and bright red nails of the pop singer Rihanna appear. Even his own body is reimagined through feminine myths, as Shimoyama appears in his paintings as a mermaid or the Greek nymph Daphne. Skin tone is created from a rainbow of colors absorbed from the landscape or surroundings: the black of the night sky, orange of a distant sunset, or yellow and gold from regal fabrics. Both race and gender are queered and reimagined in Shimoyama’s world.”
About the Catalogue:
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby this catalogue documents the first museum exhibition of Shimoyama’s figurative paintings and sculptures. Multiple essays and an artist interview examine the complexities of race and sexuality presented in the work.
Texts by: Jessica Beck, Alex Fialho, Rickey Laurentiis, Emily Colucci with Devan Shimoyama
Hardcover, 100 pages, 60+ illustrations
Published by The Andy Warhol Museum, 2018