The Artist Up Close: Devan Shimoyama

Catalogue contributors, Jessica Beck, Emily Colucci, Alex Fialho, and Rickey Laurentiis, talk with Devan Shimoyama about his work and practice. This event serves as a closing dialogue for the exhibition, Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby, and offers a chance for the community to respond and meet the artist. Shimoyama and authors will be available to sign copies of the exhibition catalogue, which will be for sale in The Warhol Store.

Jessica Beck is the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum. Beck has curated many projects, including Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, the first exhibition to explore the complexities of beauty, pain, and perfection in Warhol’s practice. In 2017, she brought the Firelei Báez: Bloodlines exhibition to the Warhol, and in 2018 organized the exhibition catalogue and curated Devan Shimoyama’s first museum show, Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby. As a Warhol scholar, she has written extensively on Warhol’s 1980s paintings, the AIDs epidemic, the representation of intimacy in Warhol’s contact sheets, and his relationship with the late Jon Gould. Her writings on Warhol have been published in Gagosian Quarterly, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective catalogue, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, and the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts’ publication, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End. Beck began her scholarly work on Warhol at the University of Chicago where she received her B.A. in Art History, and continued her engagement with Warhol and identity politics through her graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she wrote her dissertation on Glenn Ligon’s work and its relationship to Warhol’s practice.  Beck completed her M.A. with Distinction. Beck also serves as a visiting scholar in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Emily Colucci is a writer, curator, and co-founder of Filthy Dreams, an award-winning blog analyzing art, culture, and politics through a queer lens and with a touch of camp. In 2016, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Filthy Dreams. In addition, Emily has contributed to many publications and magazines including VICE, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, POZ, Flaunt, Art Papers, Art F City, and others. In 2017, she curated Night Fever, a group on disco and its aesthetic legacy at the Pittsburgh art space, Future Tenant; and in 2015, she co-curated Visual AIDS’s annual exhibition, Party Out Of Bounds: Nightlife As Activism Since 1980 at LaMaMa Galleria in New York, and its satellite exhibition, Courtship Disorder, which featured an installation by John Walter for London’s White Cubicle Toilet Gallery.

Alex Fialho is a curator and arts writer based in New York. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and the Programs Director for Visual AIDS, where he facilitates projects around both the history and immediacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, with particular stakes intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. Together with Melissa Levin, Fialho manages The Michael Richards Estate and has curated multiple exhibitions stewarding the legacy of Richards’ art, life and legacy. Fialho has presented his research on the art of Glenn Ligon and Keith Haring at the College Art Association and NYU Fales Library. His extensive oral histories with Ron Athey, Gregg Bordowitz, Nayland Blake, Douglas Crimp, Lia Gangitano, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bill Jacobson, Patrick Moore, Jack Pierson, Joey Terrill, Julie Tolentino, Marguerite Van Cook, Jack Waters and Carrie Yamaoka are part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project.

Poet Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and is the author of Boy with Thorn (2015). Laurentiis is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. His poem, “Visible City,” opened Notes for Now, the catalogue for Prospect.3 New Orleans, curated by Franklin Sirmans. Laurentiis currently lives in Pittsburgh, and is as the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Devan Shimoyama was born in Philadelphia in 1989 and lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA in drawing and painting from Pennsylvania State University in 2011, and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2014. Shimoyama has exhibited widely at galleries throughout the United States, including New York’s De Buck Gallery, Lesley Heller Gallery, and Bravin Lee Programs; Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles; Alter Space in San Francisco; and Emmanuel Gallery in Denver. His work was also included in Realities in Contemporary Video Art at the Fondation des Etats Unis, in Paris in 2015. In 2019, Holland Cotter selected Shimoyama as one of the the New York Times’ “19 Artists to Watch,” His work has been written about in The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings, Pinwheel, the blog Filthy Dreams, and Saatchi Art. In 2016, Shimoyama was named the winner of the Miami Beach PULSE Prize at PULSE Miami Beach. He is currently represented by De Buck Gallery in New York, and is the Cooper-Siegel Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.