De'VIA

De'VIA - Deaf View/Image Art - is a genre of visual art that deliberately represents the Deaf experience and Deaf culture. The term was coined in May 1989, when nine Deaf artists gathered at Gallaudet University for the workshop "Expression: American Deaf Art," led by painter Betty G. Miller and sculptor Paul Johnston, and wrote a manifesto defining the genre just before the Deaf Way festival. The manifesto holds that De'VIA work centers Deaf experience using specific formal strategies - striking color contrast and centralized focus - and that it is not limited to Deaf artists: anyone, including hearing children of Deaf adults, may make it when the perspective is right. Two veins run through it: Resistance De'VIA, protesting audism, oralism, and forced assimilation, and Affirmation De'VIA, celebrating sign language and Deafhood.

Defining characteristics

• Striking, often clashing color contrast used for emotional emphasis
• Centralized compositions with one dominant focal point
• Exaggerated facial features - enlarged eyes, ears, hands, and mouths
• Hands rendered as the voice of the work, echoing sign language
• Recurring motifs: eyes, hands, ears, mouths, doors, children, chained limbs
• Flat, symbolic settings that read as allegory rather than realism

Key figures

• Betty G. Miller (1934-2012) — Painter known as the Mother of De'VIA; co-authored the 1989 manifesto
• Chuck Baird (1947-2012) — Painter and actor whose imagery turns ASL signs into pictures

Example works

• Ameslan Prohibited — Betty G. Miller (1972)
• Whale — Chuck Baird

Sources

• De'VIA - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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