Rituals Presents Devan Shimoyama’s Ornate Universe as the New Contemporary Sacred

Devan Shimoyama: Rituals is on view now at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, through June 14. Shimoyama, a contemporary American artist, uses mixed media to build worlds and introduce mythologies, characters, and rich symbolism to immerse audiences in his universe. This is a world in which Shimoyama pictures the Black queer experience as fantastical and ornate, while further interpreting larger ideas of vulnerability and transformation.

Rituals invites viewers to engage with the exhibition environment as a sacred space. Curator Jo Reinert contextualizes Shimoyama’s works as contemporary devotional objects, drawing on parallels to historical religious imagery, such as Byzantine icons, Baroque altarpieces, and Renaissance chapel commissions. Altarpiece panels or devotional icons across Europe, emerging in the Middle Ages, use repeated symbols, arrangements, and body language to encourage specific contemplation among contemporaneous viewers. Using a similar program of symbols and patterns, Shimoyama’s visual language system appears to be in dialogue with these iconographical traditions, creating an alternative dream world that echoes, interrogates, and subverts our surroundings. With neon colors, sequins, glitter, jewels, and fabrics, Shimoyama puts forth a new spirituality that calls viewers to reflection and new understandings of the world in which we live.

Rituals includes pieces from several series, including the Tarot series (2020–ongoing), the Barbershop series (2018–ongoing), drag self-portraits (2022), serpent portraits (2016–ongoing), Stuttered Portraits (2023–ongoing), and works from Shh... (2019–ongoing), a series that foregrounds texts and creates a visual reading list. A full exhibition catalog is available, featuring creative response pieces by writers Manuel Betancourt, Jason B. Crawford, Vernon Jordan III, Nathan Alexander Moore, Ximena Keough Serrano, Kyle Turner, Brett M. Van Hoesen, and Genevieve Waller, with essays by Dr. Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson and Vivian Zavataro.

Experience Devan Shimoyama: Rituals through June 14 at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, open 11am to 5pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and 11am to 8pm on Thursdays.

To learn more, visit ulrich.wichita.edu.