Nykelle DeVivo
Tha Crossroads
Apr 3 - 26 , 2025
Raised in a deeply spiritual household, I have come to see my artistic practice as a form of ancestral prayer. My mother, Margaret DeVivo, adopted me at birth and raised me within the spiritual arms of her Hindu ashram in rural Nebraska. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Universal Peace Center was one of the most prominent ashrams in the United States—a national hub of new-age thought and devotion to my mother’s Guru, Haidakhan Babaji. Although Babaji passed in 1984, in 2001, my mother began receiving emails from him instructing her on how to carry forward his teachings—a practice she sustained faithfully until her passing on December 15, 2023.
In 2002, my mother and I journeyed to Babaji’s temple in Northern India, Haidakhan Vishwa Mahadham, which my parents had helped to establish in the early ‘80s. I was only six, yet my mother gifted me a toy Polaroid camera to capture what I could. With it, I unknowingly photographed the ancient tree Babaji once sat beneath each day. When the film developed, Babaji’s form appeared, faint yet unmistakable, partially illuminated by the camera’s modest flash as he reclined peacefully in the tree’s shade. This experience planted the seeds for a ritual I’d continue throughout my life: using the flash to peer through the veil. As a teenager, I subconsciously honed this skill through photographing Nebraska prairie land at night, illuminating spirits I could not yet name, the images becoming the beginnings of this book.
In time, and possessed by Afrofuturist methodologies, I recognized my relationship to a lineage of spiritual workers throughout the diaspora who command reflected light as a technology for divination. I understood my image-making as a ritual, transcending the so-called “real” captured by the camera’s lens as I began photographing myself cloaked in reflective materials illuminated by large strobes, seeking to connect with deeper truths. Through the luminescence of these images, I could, paradoxically, move beyond fixed states of time and reach toward ancestral or transcendent ways of being. The late American art historian and writer Robert Farris Thompson referred to this as the flash of the spirit.
Coming of age in the Bay Area during the beginnings of the BLM movement, I used my flash to seek an understanding of the violence I experienced throughout my life. I was taken in by a group of activists/journalists who pointed my lens at late-night protests, which led to my documentation of the voids made present in the wake of Black death. Thinking of my mentor, Dewey Crumpler, I understood this void work as symbolic of spiritual potentiality, as my images began to take on darker tones to give prominence to the shadows formed by the flash's illumination. In photographing sneakers, I saw dialogues with the departed and future wishes within the living.
Returning to the Midwest, I began a practice photographing Black Queer folk who came to me as a means to physically manifest their truths through my continued use of Polaroids. Eventually doing the same for myself, it was through self-portraiture that I first saw my spirit as trans. I understood my work as having the capacity to help the transition of materializing what was meant to be—a circle of life, death, spirit, and new beginnings. My work is documentation of the moments between moments in time, the silence of my mother’s altar, the pause between the clap. I bring all that I witness to the crossroads for clarity. I bring all to the crossroads as an offering. I pray and I pray and I pray, and through it all,
I am.
"Pray and we pray and we pray
And we pray and we pray
Every day, every day, every day, every day
And we pray and we pray
And we pray and we pray"
-Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
Nykelle DeVivo (American, b. 1996, they/them) is a Portland based visual artist working with light through various mediums to navigate the crossroads between the physical world and that of their ancestors. They studied theory & photography at the San Francisco Art Institute before becoming an inaugural Google Image Equity Fellow, internationally exhibiting their work and having their photographs acquired by permanent museum collections nationwide. Nykelle is currently working on publishing their first monograph with For The Birds Trapped In Airports while pursuing a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego, where they expect to graduate in Spring 2025.