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Studio Art Visiting MFA Critic
Devan Shimoyama
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Thursday, April 30, 5:30 pm | ADB 331Abstract:
An overview of Devan Shimoyama’s multidisciplinary practice, with a focus on Black masculinity, magic, and monsters. Primarily working in painting, these works seek a throughline between the spiritual traditions of his Baptist Christian upbringing, hybrid Black diasporic religions, Egyptian mythology, and more. Pop culture references appear throughout Shimoyama’s fantasy world, from R&B music, to BET shows, to poetry, to anime. Through these references, he transforms sites of pain into spaces of reverence and remembrance. Shimoyama employs folklore, science fiction and fantasy world-building as tools through which to shape and transform his understanding of the world and his place within it.Bio:
Devan Shimoyama (b. 1989, Philadelphia) is a multimedia artist based in Pittsburgh, PA, where he also taught at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014-2023. He received his BFA from Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, New Haven in 2014. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2018); Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany (2021); CAC Malaga, Malaga, Spain (2023); and most recently at The Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS (2025) and The Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum in Glassboro, NJ (2026). He currently has work on view in A Queer Arcana at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, CA and Let There Be Light at Cannonball Arts in Seattle, WA.