RICHMOND, VA.- The ICA at VCU presents the Southeastern debut of Abigail DeVille’s Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) (2025), an immersive, gallery-sized installation that recalls the burning of Richmond in 1865. The exhibition, running June 5 through August 18, 2026, includes a sweeping assemblage of charred Colonial-style cabinets, inspired by photographs of Richmond set ablaze in the last days of the Civil War. Deo Vindice was commissioned for the recent critically acclaimed MONUMENTS exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, a collaboration with The Brick.
During the Great Migration, Abigail DeVille’s family moved north from Richmond, living in New York City’s Harlem before moving to the Bronx in the 1950s. Throughout her career, DeVille has closely studied overlooked and buried Black American histories, retelling and reclaiming them through powerful installations that place historical events within a broader context.
“In the MONUMENTS exhibition, Deo Vindice was situated among decommissioned Confederate statuary and other artworks that interrogate the unresolved legacies of Lost Cause revisionism and myth-making,” notes Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, who curated the exhibition. “Presenting the work here in Richmond allows us to continue that essential inquiry into power, erasure, and public memory in the historically charged context our location provides.”
When it became clear in April 1865 that Union forces would capture Richmond, the capital city and industrial center of the Confederacy, Confederate officials ordered their men to burn its warehouses in order to prevent the munitions and railway foundry Tredegar Iron Works from falling into Union hands. This incited further arson by civilians, and much of the city was soon reduced to rubble. Less than a week later, Robert E. Lee would surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, marking the end of the war.
The exhibition’s title evokes the allegorical figure of Vindicatrix, a statue of which once crowned the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond. That monument, unveiled in 1907—four decades after the war’s conclusion—was dismantled in 2020 by popular demand. At Vindicatrix’s feet, the motto “Deo Vindice” was inscribed, a Latin phrase meaning “With God as Our Defender” or “God Will Avenge,” echoing enduring narratives of Confederate nostalgia. On the occasion of the nation’s Semiquincentennial, Deville’s anti-monument probes a moment of fracture, serving as a corrective to the revisionist histories that have come in its wake.
Curio cabinets have historically served as status symbols, especially in the South, protecting and displaying a family’s heirlooms. In the exhibition, DeVille arranges the cabinets in clusters to mark the primary stars of the constellation Orion–a celestial system named for the hunter from Greek mythology who enraged the Earth goddess Gaia by vowing to kill every animal on earth–to create a comparison between Orion’s will to dominate and that of the Confederacy to maintain white supremacy and hegemonic power, even to the point of destroying their own communities. The ragged cloth-draped scaffolding that connects the cabinets is of the type used in monument restoration, suggesting forms that have sheltered and enshrined distorted versions of historical memory, ensuring their survival despite the decades of scholarship disproving the myths.
In the back of the gallery, a newly commissioned work, Black Hole Chapel, likewise recovers suppressed histories.
Within this chapel, Deville ushers in a chorus of voices spanning the audio recordings of Black folklorists, sharecroppers, and incarcerated people made in the mid-twentieth century by ethnomusicologists John, Ruby, and Alan Lomax, paired with Reconstruction-era transcripts of formerly enslaved individuals throughout Virginia. These overlooked stories and songs of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era resound in the space in a call-and-response fashion, creating a chamber that amplifies the agency and resilience of those who bore the brutal realities behind the Confederacy’s myth of benevolence.
Black Hole Chapel offers a sonic architecture built on real-life accounts of Black and white solidarity against the governing Confederate class, struggles against poor working and living conditions, and cries of grief and shouts for liberation and freedom, countering the myths and histories enshrined in monuments of stone.
Abigail Deville (b. 1981) creates large sculptures and installations, often incorporating found materials, that focus on themes of racial violence and lost histories, and frequently involving performance elements that bring artworks out of the galleries and into the streets. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown across the United States, at the Bronx Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in Madison Park in New York; Prospect 6 in New Orleans, Louisiana; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. DeVille has received numerous awards, including a 2025 New York City Artadia Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She was a 2017–18 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a 2015 Creative Capital Grantee, a 2014–15 Fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a 2013–14 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. DeVille received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) is curated by Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, with Kennedy Jones, Curatorial Assistant.
