Devin Troy Strother at ArtCenter

March 22–July 26, 2025

Devin Troy Strother’s If Haim Steinbach was my baby’s daddy (2019) is essentially a black wall shrunk down to the scale of a painting and mounted with tiny colorful shelves, each lined with Emoji-sized sculptures of cats, basketballs, busts in Blackface, and other motifs that frequently reappear in the artist’s work. Translating 81-year-old Steinbach’s shelves of found objects into Strother’s comedic and aesthetic language, the piece derives from a younger artist looking at an older artist’s work and recognizing his own interests reflected back at him—that of displaying odd combinations of cultural artifacts in ways that give them new meaning. It’s homage verging on parody, as spelled out for us in the title; baby’s daddy is just a funnier way of saying conceptual precedent.

The piece appeared this summer in Dancing in the Dark, an exhibition at Strother’s alma mater ArtCenter College of Art and Design. In a show overflowing with video works, paintings, installations, and sculptures, If Haim Steinbach captured a few consistent conceptual and visual elements of Strother’s work: overt references to art history; simultaneously reverent and irreverent humor; absurd combinations of imagery and found objects; and comedic applications of Black visual and linguistic vernaculars. Split between ArtCenter’s skylit Williamson Gallery and darkened Mullin Gallery, Dancing in the Dark was also a show of contrasts, where these throughlines at times appeared more tidy or chaotic, confident or uncertain, colorful or muted along the progression of Strother’s career. Gathering works from 2012 onward, the show offered a strikingly intimate look at the non-linear evolution of an artist’s identity—not identity in terms of sexuality or race, but as art historian Linda Nochlin put it, “a self-consistent language of form”¹ that must be worked and reworked over time.

Devin Troy Strother, The Garage (installation view) (2025). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of the artist and Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter.

Mounted at the entrance of the sunny Williamson Gallery, If Haim Steinbach marked the approximate chronological and physical midpoint of the space, where to the left, the newest works formed an expansive installation of sculpture and assemblage. To the right, a neat row of collaged paintings featured a signature of Strother’s early work: figures of wavy, exaggerated limbs, cut from paper and layered with items ranging from empty drug baggies to hardened paint chips harvested from the studio floor. Titles and imagery made various references to artists like Robert Motherwell and John McCracken, and recurring instances of Blackface and AAVE in titles like Nigga I Ain’t Playin With You Said Ke’Shawna to Na’Wanda (2012) sheathed racial provocations in carefree humor. This was younger Strother’s way of mocking the art world’s insatiable appetite for Black culture, the inescapable burden of his early commercial and critical success. The mood was colorful, exuberant, and self-assured.

In a recent interview, Strother expressed the desire to distance himself from his early works: “At a certain point…painting was becoming so commonplace that I eventually didn’t want to be associated with it.”² The opposite side of the room captured this markedly less buoyant mood, dismantling the graphic concerns of image-making in favor of three-dimensional installations. More flesh tones than rainbows, the messy glass retail displays of his Puente Hills series (2025) featured sepia-toned photographs and other personal ephemera, marking a turn inward that grew more pronounced with The Garage (2025). The freestanding studio, modeled after an installation by Jason Rhoades, radiated with nostalgia, uncertainty, and self-doubt, where images of the artist’s recently passed mother lined the interior. The exterior meanwhile was scrawled with a line of criticism written by Roberta Smith, and it was not positive: “But generally Mr. Strother needs to get off the bench and live up to the standards he has already set for himself.”³

The stark contrast between Strother’s older and newer work offered a remarkably candid depiction of an artist’s midcareer—an inflection point at the end of one’s youth, often marred by disillusionment and the uncertainty of what happens next. These sentiments were literally at the center of the Mullin Gallery with Untitled (Cube) (2025), a room of transparent plastic sheeting where Strother had performed Paint Office Zombie (2024) live at The Pit last year. Referencing Paul McCarthy’s Painter (1995), Paint Office Zombie also adopted McCarthy’s improvisational method of art-making by dissociation, of reaching inward and allowing those emotions to freely run their course. It was a painting tutorial allowed to spiral into slapstick mayhem, with Strother continuously slipping and falling as assistants relentlessly squirted him with acrylic paint. Throughout, he lamented the state of his market and the perils of midcareer: “You can see this cube as the limbo that I’m in.”⁴

Presented here as a multichannel video, Paint Office Zombie, alongside new paintings in the style of Philip Guston and a new video in the style of Chris Burden, marked a shift in Strother’s use of historical references. Rather than homage in recognition of historical precedent, they read more as experiments in reentering his own practice through the lens of another. As an endless font of inspiration, art history is a place artists often go to find themselves as easily as they get lost. Strother said as much at the end of Paint Office Zombie: “Sometimes you need to figure out how to reinvent yourself. […] But see, I still don’t have the inspiration, so I’m just going to lay down.”

As a midcareer survey, Dancing in the Dark catches Strother at an impasse most artists would prefer to keep hidden, but in his vulnerability, he offers viewers an important revelation: To be an artist is less an identity than a process—one of constant exploration, rearrangement, and relocating one’s position in relation to all that already exists. In Strother’s continuously expanding practice of arranging displays of cultural artifacts, Dancing in the Dark is his largest installation to date, presenting individual bodies of work as iterations of this much larger project and all its highs and lows. The bright spot in the Mullin Gallery was The Los Angeles Confidential (2024), a neon-lit, Chroma key-green kiosk of Hollywood film scripts that takes Strother’s displays of found objects in a wholly new aesthetic direction, a preview perhaps of new bodies of work to come. The word “midcareer” suggests a halfway point, leaving endless and exciting possibilities ahead.

Janelle Zara is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and the author of Becoming an Architect, a title in Simon & Schuster’s Masters at Work series. You can find her work in a variety of publications focusing on art, design, and architecture, including The Guardian, T Magazine, Artnet, and many others. Her favorite In-N-Out location is the one outside LAX.

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