‘We’re Going to Get There’: Watch Artist Abigail DeVille Stage Guerilla Performances Inspired by the Great Migration

On Friday, marches, parades, and processions across the United
States will mark Juneteenth, the 155th anniversary of the
abolition of slavery. In 2014, the New York-based artist Abigail
DeVille staged a procession of her own through the streets of
Harlem. The Great Migration sought to express both
the joy and the pain of the African American experience. The
event—which the artist also organized in Anacostia and
Baltimore—featured dancers, marching bands, and community members
all wearing DeVille’s wearable sculptures, which are meant to
signify the weight of history.

“History is the tale of the victor, right? It’s garbage,”
DeVille said in an exclusive interview for Art21’s “Extended Play” series in 2018. “The
first thing to go in history is the atrocities. Nobody wants to
remember that. Cover up—whitewash—is all attributed to the
inability to get over slavery.”

The Great Migration performances reference the era
between 1914 and 1970, when six million African Americans traveled
to the North looking for better opportunities. But DeVille’s
processions also serve as a kind of elegy to rapidly gentrifying
neighborhoods at a time when the descendants of those migrants are
now “being pushed out of the places they moved to,” DeVille
explained. “Just because it was
north didn’t mean that the racial tensions had gone
anywhere.”

Just as she views traditional American history as “garbage,”
DeVille uses discarded materials in her own work, challenging what
sort of media are considered high and low. She incorporates
tattered flags and old furniture into engulfing, room-size
installations that aim to capture the overlooked histories of Black
Americans in all their complexity and grandeur.

“Love feels like this powerful force that actually could enact
change more than hate ever could,” DeVille said. “I think hate causes a kind of exhaustion. It’s
something for me never to lose sight of—or to constantly be
reminded of—that we, as a people, we’re going to get
there.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part
of Art21’s series New York Close
Up, below. 

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration
between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking
artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art
in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all
episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play
and learn about the organization’s educational programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘We’re Going to Get There’: Watch Artist Abigail
DeVille Stage Guerilla Performances Inspired by the Great
Migration appeared first on artnet News.