Ayana M. Evans is an African-American performance artist and educator based in New York City and an adjunct professor of visual art at Brown University. She also serves as editor-at-large of Cultbytes, an online art publication.^[1]

Evans's professional training focuses on traditional art forms, including painting, sculpture and fashion design. Her performances use ordinary activities such as crossing the street, changing clothes and exercising to call attention to her experience as an African-American woman. She has performed at festivals, museums, and art festivals around the United States, Martinique, and Ghana.

Her work has been reviewed in journals such as Hyperallergic,^[2][3] New York Magazine's “The Cut”,^[4] BOMB Magazine,^[5] Cultbytes, artnet, The Coastal Post,^[6] Huffington Post, BBC, and CNN. Her performances have been described as "grueling, yet nuanced performances using her own body to help audiences understand what black women often face"^[7] and a response to "the pressures of the modern art world and the misogynoir gaze."^[8]

Ruth E. Iskin of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, said her "public guerrilla performances have often forced Caucasian, middle-class art audiences into an uncomfortable proximity with urban, African-American identity."^[9]

Personal life

Evans grew up in Chicago. Her mother and father, both behavioral health therapists, were from Alabama and Mississippi, respectively.^[10] She earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has an Associates Degree in Accessories Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

She says her work was influenced by "what happened in my family as slaves, as black people who had overcome so much just to be what is considered 'normal' by American financial standards".^[11]

Career

Evans says she shifted from fashion and painting to performance art to challenge her viewers. "In performance [as opposed to fashion] art, you are not worrying about capitalism. You can make the angriest painting, but when you put it on the wall, someone can walk away from it. But, if you are a performance artist I can cuss you out in person – I can throw a chair at you – and you got to jump," she told The Conversation.^[12] Since making the transition, she has performed at museums, galleries, and performance art festivals in the United States and Africa, including Newark Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Barnes Foundation, Medium Tings Gallery,^[13][14] Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space,^[15] NADA on Governor's Island,^[16] Panoply Performance Lab,^[17] and Ghana's Chale Wote festival.

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, a curator and the editor-in-chief of Cultbytes, says that Evans' work addresses the anger and pain of racism, sexism, being treated or paid poorly at work, and the institutionalized art world’s marginalization of performance and performance artists.^[11] Her live performances have included "Operation Catsuit", in which she walks around midtown Manhattan wearing a neon-green zebra-print bodysuit and purple stiletto-heeled shoes to gauge the reactions of passers-by, and "I Just Came Here to Find a Husband"^[18][19][20] in which she ties a laminated sign with that slogan to her back while attending public events. She says "Husband" requires physical and mental endurance, including walking for 2–4 hours, often during the heat of the day, answering personal questions, listening to romantic advice, posing for photos upon request, and explaining her performance practice.^[21]

In 2017, she performed "Throwing Hexes" as part of the Barnes Foundation's "A Person of the Crowd" exhibition.^[22][23] Also in 2017, she performed "African Body Snatchers" at the 7th Annual Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra, Ghana.

Other international performances have included the FIAP performance festival in Martinique, The Pineapple Show at Tiwani Contemporary in London and the Movement Research Performance Festival (2016 & 2018).

In 2020, during the COVID-19 global health crisis, Evans performed online as part of the Inverse Performance Festival,^[24] "Performance-in-Place: 4 Bodies 1 Screen" at The 8th Floor, Wa Na Wari,^[25] and Company Gallery, among others.

She has also been featured as a speaker at Black Portraitures.^[26]

Style

Evans centers her work around the intimate stories of black womanhood, exploring the social constructs of her own life. Trained as a painter and in fashion, color theory, texture, and fashion influence her work. Often her performances incorporate brightly colored fabrics, plastic tiaras, high heels, make-up, foodstuffs, and found objects to further engage viewers and to ground the work in both queer and popular culture. Evans uses her performance practice as a vehicle for change, as a performer, in comparison to a painter, she felt more enabled to confront “people who are unaware of their classism, people who are unaware of their racism, people who really don’t support black women, people who have a lot of gender bias and don’t support trans women, people who I think just need their eyes opened a little more.”^[10]

Other activities

Evans co-edited Institution is a Verb: A Panoply Performance Lab Compilation, published by The Operating System, with Esther Neff, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Elizabeth Lamb. Seph Rodney, staff writer at Hyperallergic, praised the book as "a historical archive relating how the artists of PPL used that space to come into their powers and learn how to breathe fire.” About the publications importance Martha Wilson commented: "It's imperative [to document ephemeral art practice] if contemporary visual art performance is to be understood and analyzed in the future. The work of Panoply Performance Laboratory, which presented artists from 2012 to 2018, stands as a model organization, responsible for galvanizing the community it served."^[36]

References