AYANA EVANS
Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. In 2015 she received the Jerome Foundation's Theater and Travel & Study Grant for artistic research abroad. During the summer of 2016 Evans completed her installment of the residency, "Back in Five Minutes" at El Museo Del Barrio in NYC. The next year she completed a 10 hour endurance based, citywide performance and 100 person performative dinner party in the Barnes Foundation museum (free and open to the public) during the Spring of 2017 for "A Person of the Crowd” which was a major performance art survey featuring artists such as, Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera and William Pope L. in Philadelphia, PA. Her international work includes participation in: FIAP performance festival in Martinique, The Pineapple Show at Tiwani Contemporary in London, and Ghana's Chale Wote festival which drew 30,000 people. Evans was a 2018 Fellow in the Studio Immersion Program at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, as well as, a 2018 resident and grant recipient at Artists Alliance Inc (NYC), 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art (one of the highest awards in performance art within the United States), 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, and 2019 artist in resident for Art on the Vine at Martha's Vineyard. In addition to her numerous guerilla street performances, Evans has performed at the Queens Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, and the Bronx Museum. During 2018 and 2019 Evans completed her first three solo exhibitions with Medium Tings Gallery (Brooklyn), Cuchifritos Gallery (NYC) and the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop with New Art Dealers Alliance(NADA) at Governors Island, NY. Her recent press includes: The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, New York Magazine's The Cut, Hyperallergic, and CNN. Evans is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University.
photo by Tsedaye Makonnen
photo by Jason Wallace
“Through participatory performance art-practices I hope to critically explore the semiotic and political economy of presumed knowledge that are lived through my body. Making-Art-While-a-Woman-and-Black is a matter of conceptually choosing how I perform my ‘self’ through different negotiations of social ideals and manifestations, which contextualize my personal grounding. We frequently articulate these ideals through different modes of appearances in our daily (ritualistic-habitual-cultural) living practices, such as mundane repetitive movements, or physical struggles. I often perform these struggles and repetitive acts in my work.”