Abigail DeVille: Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet)
Beverly W. Reynolds Gallery 
June 5 – August 18, 2026

Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) (2025) is an immersive sculptural installation by Bronx-based artist Abigail DeVille featuring a sweeping assemblage of charred colonial-style cabinets and other furniture, inspired by photographs of homes in Richmond burned in the last days of the Civil War. Originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for the acclaimed 2025 exhibition MONUMENTS, a collaboration with The Brick, Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) continues DeVille’s practice of creating powerful installations—often using found materials—that connect past and future, placing historical events within a broader context. In Deo Vindice, DeVille, whose family moved to New York from Virginia during the Great Migration, reflects a fateful day in the history of Richmond. On April 2, 1865, as Union forces closed in on the Confederate capital, retreating Confederate officials ordered their troops to burn the city’s strategic sites—including munitions factories and the Tredegar Iron Works railway foundry—to keep them from falling into enemy hands. The resulting fire spread and destroyed much of the downtown. Photographs taken after the blaze, which preceded Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox by mere days, document Richmond’s devastation—a city reduced to ruins by its own political leaders. “Deo Vindice,” Latin for “With God, our Defender,” was the official motto of the Confederate States of America, appearing on the nation’s Great Seal.

The Richmond debut of Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) is curated by Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA.