BIO

 

Devyn Briggs grew up in Bethlehem, PA, and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, earning a BFA  and an MPS in Business of Art & Design. In addition to her artistic practice, she has worked in marketing, arts administration, arts education, and higher education. She currently teaches art at Northampton Community College.

 

STATEMENT

 

My work is a means of capturing, distilling, and cultivating the aesthetic structures and harmonies that fascinate and satisfy me. It’s an obsessive exercise. I filter through the cultural artifacts of my heritage to gather the raw materials of color, texture, pattern, and rhythm that resonate incessantly in my mind. Only then can I unceremoniously cut them up and rearrange them into a visual language that strains to translate and explain the origin of that aesthetic impulse. 

 

Are these perceptions of beauty cultural? Genetic? Spiritual? What is it about the vibrant colors of hot lands, the dense geometries of ancient craft traditions, and the vibrant, unorganized fullness of tropical foliage that nourish me? Using the foundational and universal elements of abstraction, the work strives to answers those questions, exploring the complex intersections of multiculturalism, mixed-race identity, Latinidad, spirituality, personal mythology, and the deeply rooted longing for ancestral land.