Abigail DeVille - A Periphery of Understanding

Artist-in-Residence | Installation & Public Program

November 28 – December 6, 2026
Edge Zones, Miami

Exhibition Opening

Saturday, November 28, 2026, 6 - 9PM

DeVille is internationally recognized for her ambitious sculptural installations and interdisciplinary practice, which investigate buried histories, forgotten narratives, and unresolved contradictions within American society. Working with found objects, discarded materials, and architectural fragments, DeVille constructs environments that reveal the historical forces shaping collective understandings of freedom, identity, and belonging. Her artistic practice draws inspiration from James Baldwin's reflections on the responsibility of artists to confront historical truths and reveal the contradictions within society. For DeVille, art becomes a form of historical excavation, an act of compassion, and an invitation to imagine possibilities beyond inherited structures of exclusion.

In A Periphery of Understanding, DeVille's ongoing artistic inquiry offers a framework for considering how histories are constructed, remembered, and contested. Her work invites audiences to confront what remains unseen or deliberately forgotten and to recognize the continuing presence of the past within contemporary life.

Known for her immersive installations and sculptural works, DeVille explores the intersections of history, memory, identity, and the often-overlooked narratives embedded within the American landscape. Through the use of found materials, archival references, and site-responsive interventions, her practice examines the ways histories are constructed, preserved, and contested.

A Periphery of Understanding will open to the public on Saturday, November 28, and remain on view through Sunday, December 6, 2026.

Special Breakfast Conversation

Abigail DeVille and Yanira Collado
Moderated by Elia Alba

Saturday, December 5, 2026
9:00–11:00 AM
Edge Zones, Miami

As part of the residency's public programming, Edge Zones will host a special breakfast conversation featuring Abigail DeVille and Yanira Collado, moderated by acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Elia Alba.

Bringing together three artists whose practices engage with questions of cultural memory, identity, history, and representation, the conversation will offer an opportunity to explore the relationships between artistic practice, lived experience, and the narratives that shape our understanding of the present.

Guests are invited to join the artists for an intimate morning of dialogue and exchange.

On View: November 28 – December 6, 2026
Opening: Saturday, November 28
Special Breakfast Conversation: Saturday, December 5, 9:00–11:00 AM

Abigail DeVille

Born to an Afro-Dominican mother who immigrated to Harlem in the early 1960s and an African American father raised in the Bronx, she explores both earthly sites, such as an empty Harlem lot thought to be a seventeenth-century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans, and the cosmos as a site of expansive dreaming and potential for marginalized peoples. DeVille utilizes recognizable structures and symbols, such as scaffolding, spaceships, mannequins, and the United States flag, to traverse the local and the galactic while interrogating freedom as both a constitutional value and personal liberation.

DeVille has received numerous awards and honors including being named 2025 New York City Artadia Award recipient, 2024–25 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, 2024 Bogliasco Fellow, recipient of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, 2018 United States Artists Fellow, 2017–18 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, 2015 Creative Capital Grantee, 2014–15 Fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the 2015 Obie Award for Design for Prophetika: An Oratorio (La MaMa), 2013–14 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant recipient. DeVille received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology.