Abigail DeVille's Harlem Stories

How does an artist acknowledge forgotten people? In this film, artist Abigail DeVille stalks the streets of Harlem with a trash-laden push cart, creating temporary sculptural interventions along the way. Stopping at Lenox Avenue and 131st Street, Bronx-born DeVille tucks a smiling plaster cast of her face into an outdoor planter. It’s the site of her grandfather’s childhood home, a former brownstone converted into a conspicuous eyesore of an apartment building. DeVille explains that placing the sculpture there is an act of personal and historical reclamation, a way of acknowledging “groups of people that occupied a space that no longer exists…but helped shape the space into what it is now.” Over Super 8mm film footage of contemporary Harlem, DeVille describes a landscape under the constant pressure of development and gentrification.

“It feels like the earth is shifting,” she says, “New groups of people are moving in and old groups of people are being pushed out. So it’s almost like migratory patterns of birds.” Pushing her unwieldy cart to the East River no man’s land at the base of the Willis Avenue Bridge, DeVille unloads heaps of distressed wood, rusty metal, mannequin heads, and trash bags. This unkempt and unceremonious site is the presumed location of a pre-colonial African burial ground where free and enslaved families buried their dead when Dutch settlers farmed upper Manhattan, dating back to the seventeenth century. DeVille characterizes her sculpture as “an exercise in acknowledgment” and asserts that trash is the ideal material for talking about a forgotten history “because that’s how those people were treated. That’s how that site is being treated.”

More information and creditsFeaturing DeVille’s artwork Harlem River Blues (2014).

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