A Walking Tour with Devan Shimoyama
Cry, Baby
The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh)
October 13-March 17
Eyes are everywhere in Cry, Baby, Devan Shimoyama’s first solo museum exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Peering out from paintings where glittering snakes curl around the bodies of black male figures, who are mostly composites, “the eyes are always indicative of the mother figure,” Shimoyama explained as he led a small group around the exhibition. They are the comforting eyes of his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt. Their oval, extended shape resembling his own eyes, too.
Currently an assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, Shimoyama was born in Philadelphia and educated as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University and at Yale University for a master’s degree. Although he always loved art as a child, he wrestled between two disparate subjects, visual art and biology. “I woke up literally one day in my junior year and just changed my major,” said the 29-year-old artist.
Since that moment, Shimoyama’s work has attracted considerable attention in the art world, his paintings often incorporating unconventional materials such as sequins, feathers, and glitter as they navigate two worlds: beauty and danger. What is life really like, he asks, for black males in America? What is life really like for queer black males in America?
In the wall text to Snake Baby (2016), Shimoyama wrote that he sees “both the snake and the black male as beings that were uprooted from their origins and demonized in a new space. In this series of works, the snake and the figure have a symbiotic relationship.”
In a series of paintings first exhibited in New York in the exhibit Sweet (a negative word for feminine men), Shimoyama focused on the iconic black barbershop which for him was not a place of comfort. “When I was giving talks on the work,” he said, “so many black men showed up and said they had similar experiences.”
Thinking about black owned spaces when he was growing up, where men desired to show off, positioning themselves with lots of gold chains, Shimoyama incorporated drag and queer materials into the work. He was strongly attracted to this “constructed identity of beauty and wealth and glamour.”
There was so much intimacy, so much focus on the body, and simultaneously so much danger, in that world, too. In his barbershop paintings, we never see the barber, only his hands. In the last work in the series, Sit, Still, a self-portrait, the barber is about to shave him, a large razor at Shimoyama’s throat. The background, floral feathers, pink and soft, a seeming contradiction.
Elsewhere in the exhibit are photographs of portals, driftwood sculptures that Shimoyama constructed or found on the beach in Fire Island, NY, a community known for its queer residents and visitors. Some are embellished with glitter and other artifacts of drag culture.
Three works are clearly political: Flood (2016), painted the day after Trump’s election which Shimoyama said, “stirred up intense feelings in him; For Tamir, swing seats decorated with beads and flowers, which remember Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy killed by Cleveland policemen while he was on a swing set; and February, a hoodie transformed into a floral urban memorial, in remembrance of Trayvon Martin whose shooting in Florida in 2012 made national news. The hoodie has a small heart on it, not on the left side, but on the right. “That would have been too obvious,” Shimoyama said.
Pausing before Weed Picker (2018), the most recent painting in the show, Shimoyama said that it was inspired by his becoming a homeowner. The work represents his branching out into personal narrative. Shimoyama is focusing on community and black ownership. In the painting, leaves are falling from the trees, as Shimoyama tends his garden. He is dressed in a T-shirt which sports the names of black female characters from the sitcom “Living Single,” a show that Shimoyama admired for its celebration of black life. Above, hanging from a telephone line, a pair of Yeezy Adidas sneakers designed by Kanye West, swing in the sky. Although shoes are often used to mark gang turf, they are included here, Shimoyama said, to express his critical view of West who does not, he said, positively represent blacks.
All photos: Shael Shapiro
“His Example Helped Them Find a Voice,” a NYT feature (11/04/2018)on Andy Warhol’s influence which includes an interview with Devan Shimoyama:
