DeVon Stanfield

American contemporary Pop artist DeVon Stanfield creates richly layered mixed-media works that transform icons of film, music, television, fashion, sports, comics, and popular culture. Combining collage, acrylic paint, photographic and printed imagery, diamond dust, crystals, and high-gloss resin, DeVon builds tactile compositions that reward close inspection with layers of references, imagery, and unexpected details.

Born in Hollywood, California, in 1968, DeVon grew up surrounded by the imagery of film, music, and popular culture that would later become central to his work. After his family relocated first to the San Francisco Bay Area and later to a rural community near Park City, Utah, he developed an early interest in both classical and jazz music and initially entered college on a music scholarship.

DeVon’s direction changed after he began screen-printing his own designs on T-shirts for rock concerts and specialty stores. He shifted his studies toward the visual arts at the University of Utah, where he ultimately created a specialized bachelor’s degree in Arts Promotion combining studio art with business and marketing.

Before concentrating fully on his own artwork, DeVon worked extensively with other artists through gallery management, artist promotion, and exhibition projects. His involvement with events surrounding the Sundance Film Festival also brought him into contact with artist Steve Kaufman, a former assistant to Andy Warhol. DeVon and Kaufman subsequently collaborated on events until Kaufman’s death in 2010.

That relationship provided DeVon with firsthand exposure to techniques and ideas associated with the Pop Art tradition, while his own work developed into a distinctly layered mixed-media practice. Fragments of magazines, books, calendars, photographs, and other printed material become part of compositions that combine painting, collage, shimmering diamond dust and crystals beneath glossy resin surfaces.

Beneath the recognizable imagery, DeVon is interested in the stories and associations attached to cultural icons. Influenced by Carl Jung’s ideas about archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s writings on mythology and the hero’s journey, he approaches popular culture as a kind of modern mythology—a shared visual language through which familiar figures can acquire meanings beyond their original context.

This idea also informs the dense layering of his work. Details, references, and visual “Easter eggs” are deliberately embedded throughout his compositions, allowing an image that may initially appear immediately familiar to reveal additional connections on closer inspection.

Through this combination of popular imagery, layered narrative, and highly tactile surfaces, DeVon brings his own perspective to contemporary Pop Art, transforming familiar cultural icons into complex assemblages of image, memory, and association. His work has been featured in more than 60 solo exhibitions internationally and is held in museum, corporate, and private collections.