Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce Resemblance, Leah DeVun’s first exhibition with the gallery. 

For over two years, DeVun has photographed her partner, a transgender father, and their son in and around their home, recording their daily life. Much of what they do is joyful, and the photographs offer a counterweight to stories about antiLGBTQ violence and trauma that dominate the news. These images, in contrast, are a visual reminder that trans life can also be full of safety and care.

Leah DeVun is a professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches in the departments of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her scholarship, artwork, and curatorial practice reflect her interests in LGBTQ history, science and medicine, religion, archival practice, utopian communities, and gender and the body. Devun the author of the award-winning books The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021) and Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia, 2009); and co-editor of "Trans*historicities" (with Zeb Tortorici), a special issue of the journal TSQ (Duke, 2018). DeVun’s essays and reviews have appeared in Wired, Spot, Radical History Review, GLQ, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), Osiris, ASAP/Journal, postmedieval, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and a number of books. She has also lectured internationally and received grants and residential fellowships from the National Science Foundation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UCLA, the Huntington Library, and the Stanford Humanities Center, among others. 

In addition to DeVun’s academic writings, she has been interviewed or had her work featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Huffington Post, People, Hyperallergic, LA Review of Books, Out, Art Papers, Feature  Shoot, Redbook, Slate, JSTOR Daily, Capricious, LA Weekly, Gallerist, Buzzfeed, Forbes, Refinery29, and Modern Painters, and has participated in exhibitions and programs at universities and arts venues that include Baxter Street Camera Club (NY, NY), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX), the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver), Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX), Leslie-Lohman Museum (NY, NY), NYU's Tracey-Barry Gallery (NY, NY), the ONE Archives Gallery and Museum at USC (West Hollywood, CA), Paul Robeson Galleries (Newark, NJ), the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY), Yale University School of Art (New Haven, CT), and other sites. DeVun has also been selected for reviews and festivals such as the New York (Times) Portfolio Review, Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 50 (2023),  SPRING/BREAK (NYC), PhotoVogue Festival (Milan, with Eye Mama Project), and ImageNation (Milan and Paris). 

For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.