Devan Shimoyama in Conversation with Alex Bispham and Pia Gottschaller

Why It Matters

Shimoyama’s practice proves that high‑impact, community‑oriented art can simultaneously elevate marginalized identities and reshape public perception, offering a blueprint for cultural institutions aiming to foster equity through creative engagement.

Key Takeaways

• Devon uses glitter, sequins, jewelry to celebrate black queer bodies.
• Barber shop installations provide free haircuts and community dialogue.
• Large-scale mixed-media portraits blend oil, pencil, and embellishments.
• Projects explore black masculinity, queerness, and cultural stereotypes.
• Residency in London expands his practice and international audience.

Summary

The event, hosted by the CLD Center for the Art of the Americas, featured Devon Shimoyama, a Philadelphia‑born artist now based in Pittsburgh, discussing his practice during a conversation with Alex Bispham and Pia Gottschaller.

Shimoyama’s work merges painting, collage, and sculpture, employing oil, acrylic, glitter, sequins, costume jewelry and other lustrous materials to depict the black queer male body. He emphasizes texture and scale, often creating life‑size portraits that elevate his subjects to mythic stature while interrogating gender, race and spirituality.

Signature projects include the Mighty Mighty the Barberhop installation, a functional barber shop housed in a shipping container that offered over 500 free haircuts to Black and unhoused communities, and a series of horror‑film‑inspired portraits drawn from the 1970s exploitation movie Vampira/Old Dracula, which he reimagines as a commentary on Black monstrosity and resilience.

By situating personal narrative within public spaces, Shimoyama expands representation of Black queer joy, challenges cultural stereotypes, and demonstrates how art can serve as both aesthetic celebration and social intervention, a model increasingly relevant for institutions seeking inclusive programming.

Original Description

Devan Shimoyama is no stranger to excess. The artist crafts his own Black, queer mythology in bright colours and lavishly embellished surfaces. Within his visual lexicon, Shimoyama employs materials like building blocks to construct a space of queer transcendence: glitter, rhinestones, sequins, and fabric.

In his first public talk in the UK, Shimoyama will discuss a range of work that weaves together popular culture, mythological archetypes, and personal narrative. Shimoyama’s Barbershop Project invited members of the public to have their hair cut in a joyous space surrounded by paintings of himself, loved ones, and imagined portraits that reframe the hyper-masculine spaces of his youth. His swing sculptures and hoodies are tributes to victims of racialised gun violence and use silk flowers to evoke spontaneous memorials, celebrating life between permanence and impermanence. The Tarot Series reimagines the twenty-two Major Arcana and takes the artist and the viewer on a “Fool’s journey” via the divinatory cards.

These works seek a through-line between spiritual traditions encompassing his Baptist Christian upbringing, hybrid Black diasporic religions, Egyptian mythology, and more. Nods to popular culture suffuse Shimoyama’s fantasy world, from music (the Princess of R&B, Aaliyah), to poetry (the Jamaican writer Safiya Sinclair), to anime (the television series and manga Sailor Moon). Through these references, he transforms sites of pain into spaces of reverence and remembrance. From folklore to fantasy world-building, Shimoyama amplifies Black queer joy.

Organised by Professor Jo Applin, Alex Bispham, and Dr Pia Gottschaller, as part of the Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas.

Speakers:

Devan Shimoyama (b. 1989, Philadelphia) is a multimedia artist based in Pittsburgh, PA, where he has also taught at Carnegie Mellon University. His exhibition Shift is currently on view at Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum. In the United States, his work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and the Andy Warhol Museum, as well as at the Kunstpalais Erlangen, CAC Málaga, the Serlachius Museum, Mänttä, and VETA Galeria in Europe.

Alex Bispham is a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute. Working on alternative spirituality, she is seeking to define a queer theory of materials. Devan Shimoyama is among the artists being examined in her thesis, which explores spiritual-artistic practices that disrupt perceived hierarchies of matter/idea, reason/emotion, and high/low art. Alex previously held positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Hôtel Drouot.

Pia Gottschaller is a Reader in Technical Art History at the Courtauld Institute, London, where she teaches across art history, conservation and curating. Prior appointments include Senior Research Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles; paintings conservator at Tate, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Associate Curator at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. She is the recipient of a number of research grants and scholarships, most recently from the Getty Foundation (2021). Her monographs, edited volumes and essays focus on modern and contemporary European, US- and Latin American artists and movements, and her most recent book Unruly Tools: Contemporary Artists and the Reinvention of Painting examines the role of non-conventional tools in global artistic practice.