For her first official solo show in June 2018, the artist Ayana Evans was dressed in a skintight, neon green tiger-stripe catsuit, doing jumping jacks (in heels) or push-ups; then she challenged audience members to get down on the ground and do the push-ups with her. The audience at Medium Tings gallery in Brooklyn consisted of several artists, college friends and former students she had taught at Brown. The mood was jubilant; Ms. Evans gave everyone a hug at the end. In later performances she wore a floor-length gown, heels again and full makeup while going through the same calisthenic routines, until the makeup is washed away in a torrent of sweat and the artist almost melts into the floor. At other times she has popped up uninvited at exclusive events such as the Annual Black Ivy Alumni Gala wearing a fashionable dress and a sign pinned to her back that reads “I Just Came Here to Find a Husband.” There is no shame to her game.
Ms. Evans said there was an aspect to her wearing the neon catsuit that is about self-acceptance. She had returned to the art scene after some time away working as an accessories designer, and though the fields of art and fashion are adjacent, she found herself feeling alienated. “I used to go to art events and no one would talk to me,” she said. “It was really lonely.”
Ms. Evans found the catsuit at a designer friend’s sample sale in 2012; it was one of the few things that fit her well, and so it became her art scene uniform. The catsuit operates like a trademark: It helps to make her a recognizable figure in the performance art scene in New York City, and more, donning it acts as a cue that she is going to work. And on June 24, she will have an Instagram live performance hosted by Wa Na Wari Gallery in Seattle.
The artist is originally from Chicago, but her mother grew up in Alabama, and father in Mississippi, so a Southern lilt can be heard when she speaks. Both her parents are behavioral health therapists with doctoral degrees, and though Ms. Evans decided against becoming an academic, she demonstrates an incisive understanding of how to trouble a sleeping consciousness. In one performance, “Girl, I’d Drink Your Bath Water,” created in Martinique in 2017, she drinks the soapy water from the tub in which she has taken a sponge bath while dressed in her catsuit. Her work focuses on perceptively playing with the tropes of femininity to dramatize the carefully calibrated balance that she and other people who identify as femme strike: among them, having a confident presence, wanting to be taken seriously, being regarded as desirable, and being emotionally or sexually available. The accoutrements of hair, makeup, dress, attitude, comportment and even companionship are all recruited to fine-tune the signal as needed. But Ms. Evans doesn’t want to succumb to the trap of unceasing self-regulation and so turns up the controls of bodily presence until the signals commingle into dissonance.
Ms. Evans’s labors underscore and express all the risk and power of her body, which is regarded as voluptuous. She is influenced by the artists Pope.L and Lorraine O’Grady, particularly with Ms. O’Grady’s willingness to take risks with her body and her ability to use her performances to issue a multifaceted critique of gender and race relations. Ms. Evans takes the baton and runs further. Roberta Fallon, co-founder of Artblog, describes Ms. Evans as, “One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur.” I have seen the artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor-length lace gown, a dollar-store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips — risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement.
Though she initially trained to be a painter, Ms. Evans became enamored with performance in the late aughts. It enabled her 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,” she said.
Ms. Evans is deeply committed to not only making her audiences fully aware of the work of being a woman, but the particular labor associated with being a black woman in the United States. This has never been a popular avenue of discussion. She told Jessica Lanay in BOMB magazine that critics have advised her to speak in code in order to garner more attention, using words such as “feminism,” “radical feminism,” “body politics” and “acceptance,” rather than say her work is about black womanhood.
Through performing in outfits that mirror the ways some middle-class black women are presented via popular culture, Ms. Evans focuses on herself as being representative of the general situation of black women, who experience persistent gender and race discrimination. They suffer from higher rates of incarceration and poverty and experience intimate-partner violence more often than other women. Ms. Evans said that on dating sites, she sees that black women are always picked last. “I think it boils down to, somebody has to be on the bottom,” she said. “We live in a society where that’s how things are set up and a lot of people are invested in not being on the bottom with you.” In this light, Ms. Evans’s performance in her catsuit does the crucial work of not succumbing to this relegation. She makes herself hypervisible. Her black body cannot, and will not, be ignored or brushed aside.
For eight years, Ms. Evans has been making punishing, layered performances. Her most grueling one consisted of her doing jumping jacks for three hours during the Rapid Pulse Festival in Chicago in 2016. Typically Ms. Evans only goes for two hours, but she extended herself because her family and friends were there. “My mother and my friends started jumping with me at one point, an older woman on the street started jumping; they want to encourage me to keep going,” she said. “I used to say I’m jumping through hoops for men,” she said. “And so, it was kind of like I need to work that out.”
The artist is making visible the labor that black women often carry out without being acknowledged by their romantic partners, their families, their peers, or their neighbors — the labor of child care, of organizing the home, the civic labor voluntarily given to church groups and community organizations. In addition, Ms. Evans’s work also alludes to the underlying disparities of critical attention, institutional support and financial status in an art scene that overwhelmingly favors white men.
“There’s an underlying feeling that this is how hard I have to go to make it as a black woman in art,” she said. “And if I do any less, you won’t be impressed.” She continued, “If I march in place you won’t be impressed; I have to jump. And if I do it for less than an hour you’re not impressed. But if I do it for two you know you couldn’t do it too, so now you’re impressed. If I do it for three it makes me legend.”
Layered within her sense of responsibility to tell the intimate stories of black womanhood, there is also an aspect of the work that has to do with her feelings for her father, who has Parkinson’s disease. The physically punishing performances are a kind of ode to her father, who used to be so fit he would run marathons.
Her achievement came with consequences. Ms. Evans said she realized she would need to work with a personal trainer before she attempted another three-hour performance. “I remember I couldn’t walk for like a week.”
In a performance I attended in March 2019, “A Black Woman’s Art Show and … A White Man’s Exhibition” I was asked to mash myself together with a group of mostly strangers as Ms. Evans circled us with a rope pulling us into an even tighter phalanx. As we hesitated to move toward each other, she repeated herself, loudly, which made us scurry into place. She said that when she’s performing she tends to get bossy, just to keep the energy flowing and the piece moving forward. That performance ended with the now-tight-knit group, on her instructions, hoisting Ms. Evans’s body above us, moving her back and forth, and then marching with her held aloft out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk. She knew what she was doing. We had to be a cohesive a group to pull off that final gesture. And only later I realized that this was, in its simplest terms, about raising a black woman up — such easy, unpretentious nobility seen in a typically male, sports-oriented gesture.
The limiting factor of physically strenuous performance art (such as Pope.L’ s famous “Crawl” pieces) is that it easily falls into spectacle, which washes away the nuanced meanings of the work. “At a certain point you’re just drinking your own poison,” she said. “You’re trying to make people know that you’re in pain, but there’s a point where you’re just hurting yourself and the people who are going to get it already got it.” One way to avoid making the work a pageant of pain is to share the labor with audience members. “Come on, squish together!” she said. As participants shared the labor for a moment, our relationships to each other subtly transformed from simply being spectators. We all became engaged in trying to hold Ms. Evans’s body and keep her safe above our heads.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about hierarchies,” Ms. Evans said. “The director of the gallery is standing next to the student. Everyone’s mixing together, and I do think that there is something to these collective actions.”
The artist has discovered through physical work a way to cut through class, sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity and geography, and create a space for agency. “Especially for the femme-presenting people in the audience, I was like, ‘People don’t expect you to ask for what you need, and I’m here screaming for it in front of you. Take that with you, remember that, because sometimes you need to demand what you need.’”
It is both a beautiful and disruptive thing to ask for what you need — to demand it; it means placing your body at risk. Ms. Evans is already there, in that place of risk, waiting for her audience to arrive and start doing the work with her.
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What It Takes to Raise a Black Woman Up - The New York Times
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