Devan Shimoyama: Rituals

Exhibition Catalog featuring Devan Shimoyama's exhibition "Rituals" at the Ulrich Museum of Art Contemporary American artist Devan Shimoyama’s work playfully and poignantly dismantles social conventions by representing the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality with compelling, intimate images. Shimoyama pictures the Black American experience and the queer experience as fantastical and ornate, using rich textures, pop-culture references, and decorative materials (an homage to both drag performance and churchgoers of his childhood), while interpreting at great depths ideas of vulnerability and transformation. Rituals contextualizes Shimoyama’s works as devotional objects, drawing multilayered parallels to historical religious imagery, such as Byzantine icons, Baroque altarpieces, and Renaissance chapel commissions, and situating these works within the contemporary landscape as today’s sacred objects and devotional icons. With neon colors, rhinestones, sequins, feathers, glitter, an