BIO

 

Devyn Briggs grew up in Bethlehem, PA and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. She studied drawing, painting, sculpture, fiber arts, and ceramics and earned a BFA with a major in Ceramics in 2013. She then earned a master's degree in the Business of Art and Design, studying creative entrepreneurship before opening a studio at the Banana Factory.

​

In addition to making art, Devyn is an educator and arts activist dedicated to fostering equity and inclusion within the Lehigh Valley arts community. She has worked in numerous areas of the art world including fine art collection management, creative start-ups, community and public art, and non-profit management. She currently works as a Career Specialist at NCC, empowering communications, arts, and design students to start successful careers. She also serves on CACLV’s Color Outside the Lines Quality of Life Committee and as an advisory board member of the Guild of Creative Citizens, a non-profit dedicated to arts equity in the Lehigh Valley. 

 

​

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.