Press Release Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby Public Programs

For immediate release

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby will mark the first museum solo exhibition of Devan Shimoyama, Philadelphia-born painter and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Spanning his burgeoning career, this exhibition includes painting, photography and sculpture, and a series of new works that will be on view for the first time. In figurative painting and self-portraiture, Shimoyama creates vulnerable yet resilient depictions of African American boyhood and masculinity.

Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby is curated by Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s Milton Fine curator of art.

Generous support of Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby is provided by the Quentin and Evelyn T. Cunningham Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Fine Foundation, Arts, Equity, & Education Fund, Karen and Jim Johnson, De Buck Gallery, Jim Spencer and Michael Lin, with additional support from Stacy and Samuel Freeman, V. Joy Simmons M.D., Mrs. Ellen and Mr. Jack Kessler, The Plastino Family Charitable Fund, and Mr. Howard C. Eglit.

Exhibition-Related Programs

The exhibition programming is expansive and dynamic including community partnerships, artist residencies with Rashaad Newsome and Kleaver Cruz, poetry readings, dance parties and dialogue with the community.

“The programming for Cry, Baby was designed to be diverse and inclusive and offer different platforms for celebration and important dialogue,” says Jessica Beck, Milton Fine curator of art. From academic settings to the barbershop, the events and public programs offer a comprehensive overview of the major themes of the exhibition: agency, racial violence, uplift, and beauty.”

The Black Ecstatic: An Evening of Poetry & Film
Thursday, October 25, 2018
7 p.m.
Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 125 (Oakland)

Co-presented with Center for African American Poetry (CAAPP) at University of Pittsburgh
Three contemporary black poets, Airea D. Matthews, Roger Reeves, and Safiya Sinclair, and filmmaker Jamal T. Lewis will consider how “the ecstatic” functions in their artistic work and personal lives, within the context of the contemporary moment, where attention to black political and social life emphasizes death and unjustifiable violence. The program, which will include poetry performances, a brief film screening, and discussion, is organized and moderated by Rickey Laurentiis, the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. This program is presented in conjunction with The Warhol’s Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby exhibition, curated by Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s Milton Fine curator of art.

Jamal T. Lewis is an emerging artist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Lewis, known as ‘fatfemme’, is the director and star of No Fats, No Femmes, a feature length documentary about desire and body image in gay male communities. A graduate of Morehouse College and The New School, Lewis produces work around the body, specifically exploring and interrogating identity formation, race, gender, sexuality, desire, beauty, and ugliness.

Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, Four Way Review, The Indiana Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, the 2016 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House. She received her B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, M.P.A. from the University of Michigan, and M.F.A. from the University of Michigan.

Roger Reeves received an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, Austin. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry, and the Indiana Review, and was included in Best New Poets 2009. Reeves was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2008; he is also the recipient of two Bread Loaf Scholarships and a Cave Canem Fellowship. He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) is Reeves’s first book.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.” Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, and the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Free; Registration is suggested; Visit warhol.org

Shop Talk: Kleaver Cruz and Devan Shimoyama discuss Black Joy, Masculinity, and Barbershops
Friday, October 26, 2018
7 p.m.
The Warhol theater

Co-presented with Center for African American Poetry (CAAPP) at University of Pittsburgh
Kleaver Cruz brings The Black Joy Project to Pittsburgh. For one week in October, Cruz will explore black spaces in Pittsburgh, take portraits, and conduct conversations regarding Black joy. As a culmination of his residency, he will speak with artist Devan Shimoyama and community members about navigating black barbershops and the complex experience of being queer in these spaces. The event will be followed by a late-night dance party in the museum entrance space with a local DJ and a live performance by Brooklyn born, Pittsburgh based performer, Brendon Hawkins. This event is organized by Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s Milton Fine curator of art in collaboration with Rickey Laurentiis the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Kleaver Cruz, a native of New York, is a writer and creator of The Black Joy Project, a digital and real-world movement, which centers Black joy as a form of resistance. Cruz is a member of “We Are All Dominican,” a grassroots collective that amplifies voices and supports the work of Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. Cruz is part of the poetic duo, The Delta, which has performed at The Nuyorican Poet’s Café and Bowery Poetry Club. Cruz has presented and conducted his work across the African Diaspora in South Africa, France, and Brazil.
Free; Registration is suggested; Visit warhol.org

Rashaad Newsome: Shade Compositions
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
8 p.m.
Carnegie Music Hall (Oakland)

Rashaad Newsome, renowned New York based artist, will make his Pittsburgh debut of Shade Compositions, an ongoing performance project that launched in 2005. Throughout the Fall of 2018, Newsome will be working in Pittsburgh, casting local performers, and staging rehearsals for Shade Compositions, the artist’s critically acclaimed performance. In this performance, Newsome is both conductor, composer and vocal choreographer. Leading an ensemble of locally cast self-identifying black female and femme performers, whose individual voices and gestures are synthesized to form improvisatory orchestral music. Newsome explores the complexities of social power structures and questions of agency.

During the performance, Newsome collages video and audio using hacked video game controllers. For over a decade Newsome has engaged in casual, but extensive ethnographic and linguistic research into global iterations of “Black Vernacular”—a variety of English natively spoken by most working and middle-class African Americans, particularly in urban communities. Through his visually engaging and dynamic style of live performance and video, Newsome explores the complexities of social power structures and questions of agency.

This event is organized by Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s Milton Fine curator of art in conjunction with the exhibition Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby.

Rashaad Newsome was born in 1979 in New Orleans, and lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world including: Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MoMAPS1, SFMOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia, and MUSA, Vienna, Austria, and the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture. Newsome’s work is in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The SFMOMA, The Studio Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The McNay Art Museum of San Antonio. In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2011 in Greater New York at MoMAPS1.
Free; Registration is suggested; Visit warhol.org

The Artist Up Close: Devan Shimoyama
Thursday, March 14, 2019
7 p.m.
The Warhol theater

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. She curated the Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby exhibition.

Emily Colucci is a writer, curator, and co-founder of Filthy Dreams, an art blog for which she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2016. Colucci has contributed to publications and magazines including VICE, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Art Papers, Art F City and others. In 2017, she curated Night Fever at Future Tenant in Pittsburgh 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.

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. Together with Melissa Levin, Fialho manages The Michael Richards Estate and has curated multiple exhibitions stewarding the legacy of Richards’ art and life. Fialho has conducted extensive oral histories as part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project.

Poet Rickey Laurentiis 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,” was featured in the exhibition catalogue for Prospect.3 New Orleans. Laurentiis is currently the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Free; Registration is suggested; Visit warhol.org

The Warhol receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and The Heinz Endowments. Further support is provided by the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

The Andy Warhol Museum

Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place of Andy Warhol’s birth, The Andy Warhol Museum holds the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials and is one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. The Warhol is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Established in 1895 by Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is a collection of four distinctive museums: Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum. The museums reach more than 1.4 million people a year through exhibitions, educational programs, outreach activities, and special events.

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