Ayana Evans in Conversation with Anna Mikaela Ekstrand
Ayana Evans
"Presenting the Black Avant Garde: a Tribute to Senga and Maren" 2019, Ayana Evans and Tsedaye Makonnen, timed tripod image shot by the artists.
Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist who was raised in Chicago. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. She sat down with Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, an accomplished independent curator living in New York City, to talk about the reality of being a performance artist, her work, and influences.
Anna Mikaela: “Indeed, the essence of Camp is love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among a small urban clique,” wrote Susan Sontag in her infamous essay Notes on “Camp” published in 1964. In all its glory, your calls-to-action, use of repurposed material – like power cords used as a jump rope – your wardrobe: the catsuit(s), ball gowns, heels, tinsel garlands, and glitter are some of the many elements that are camp and kitsch. What is your relationship with these concepts?
Ayana: Wearing bright colorful clothing, unapologetically, repurposing objects to cater to my needs, and to take up space is a way for me to be 100% myself. It is my way to assert fantasy in the everyday. RuPaul once said, and I am paraphrasing here, that the best drag always includes a little bit of humor. My work nods to drag and ballroom culture. Actually, I think humor in combination with lavish over-statement is the embodiment of camp and I believe this expression holds power. I was raised around many women with over-the-top personalities and a dress code to match. My childhood neighbor Miss Irene was like a cross between Tyler Perry's Medea character and Tina Turner's rock stage persona she wore heels and red wigs at all times, even in her silk pajamas, plus tinted sunglasses inside, and always had a cigarette dangling from her mouth or hand with a gun in her purse. Yet, she was an amazing cook and great friend to my mom. She and other strong-willed people who live their truths fully inspire me and influence my work.
Anna Mikaela: That sounds utterly fabulous. However, your work is not all glitz and glam and it is often very demanding of the audience in ways that might be uncomfortable.
Ayana: My practice holds a lot of anger and pain. I can be angry about racism, sexism, being treated poorly at work, being paid poorly, or for the institutionalized art world’s marginalization of performance and performance artists. Resentment for what happened to people in my family as slaves, as black people who had to overcome so much just to be what is considered "normal" by American financial standards is also apparent. Then there is general anger for things that are happening to my friends who are queer, who are immigrants, and who are less able-bodied. Anger shows up in my performances as yelling and bossing everyone around (a bit of reparation). There are so many things to be mad about and it is unhealthy to hold things in, so I don't, not one bit when I perform.
Anna Mikaela: You can shift the energy in the room quickly from discomfort to joy and the collective work you request imbues a sense of community in your audience. In college, you were part of a sorority, a lifelong sisterhood of sorts. How does the notion of community influence your practice?
Ayana: The collective work whether it's feeding me or carrying me is a metaphor for taking care of the black body and taking care of all femmes. The demands that I place on the audience is a way for me to say: “ask or demand what you need in life!” Most of my audiences are white. So, I'm literally telling white people to hold up a black body out of respect and with care.
Collective work brings people together and cuts through social barriers. And, of course, for me, the notion of the collective relates to my deep engagement with sorority culture. There is a long tradition of sororities in the African-American middle class and they hold an important philanthropic role in the community that many in the art world are not aware of. Socially, black sorority culture is a million miles away from the DIY performance art spaces that I came up in, but both are part of who I am and intermingle in my work.
Anna Mikaela: In your work you recreate, dismantle, and reshape perceptions of African-American female identity. Bravely and with humor your durational performance project “I Just Came Here to Find a Husband” highlighted the pressure you felt to find a life partner. Tell us more about it.
Ayana: Ah!! Thank you for saying that!
I started that project as I was getting older and starting to realize that I would probably never have the 45 years of marriage that my parents have. At the same time, I thought I was this cool art girl who should not be worried about heteronormative things like marriage. But the truth is I wanted a life partner BADLY and I had become completely desperate, so desperate that I was PRETENDING not to think of much else. These anxieties were deterring my art-making so, I decided to make art out if it. I made a sign that read “I Just Came to Find A Husband” laminated it and wore it on my back to events for about 2 years. It was a great release that allowed me to get over my desperation, shame, and embarrassment. Reaching beyond the art world, people came up to me and asked was I serious, suggested people for me, and most importantly told me their own stories of looking for love when I wore the sign. Often women confessed they had the same longing and thought I was brave for admitting it.
Anna Mikaela: I remember that this project got a lot of press in the mainstream media. How did the t-shirts come about?
Ayana: Eventually, people asked me to make t-shirts so I did. I'm on my second edition of 50 shirts that are replicas of the black and white sign I wore and I have both husband and wife iterations. People tell me what happens when they wear the shirt and as it turns out they are a good icebreaker if you are looking for someone serious.
Anna Mikaela: You studied painting at Brown University and Temple University and later Accessories Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. What did you learn in school that informs your current practice and what have you decided to steer away from?
Ayana: I steer away from formalism and traditional career pathways that apply to painters and designers. Miles Davis said: when you switch to a new way of making art "burn the bridge." I felt relieved when I first heard that quote because so much of what I do or have done in my career moves away from what I learned in school. But color theory, texture, and fashion are still big parts of my work!
Anna Mikaela: Most performance artists working today who graduated five and above years ago from American fine art programs did not attend classes in performance, as they were not offered. You are currently teaching at Brown (congrats!) that allows you to incorporate performance art into Foundation Art Studies at the school. How can and should academic institutions support the development of tomorrow’s performance artists?
Ayana: First I think they need to hire performance artists on staff. MOST of us are still not hired to teach performance studies! A lot of times those hired by colleges are formally trained and working in dance or theater. That's not the same as the base really being performance art. Also, support should be given to take students to performance art festivals and underground events. Right now, I think a gap is forming between those who study performance and people like myself who learned it more or less on the street and from other performers in the DIY scene. Second, knowing performance theory and dance is not the same as knowing your body and performance art. On some level, this cannot be taught; it has to be practiced. Schools need to acknowledge and teach that. You have to take a lot of time learning your body and how it reads to be a performance artist.
Anna Mikaela: How important have residencies been to your career as an artist?
Ayana: I'm usually prolific during residency because I do not want to waste the resources I have been given. In the last 2 years, I’ve been a resident at Art on the Vine (AOTV) in Martha's Vineyard, Siren Arts in Asbury Park, and in New York, Artists Alliance Inc., EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking, and SIP Fellowship. Each of the recent fellowships gave me much needed financial support, studio visits with important writers and curators, space to work and experiment, a new way to make objects relate to my practice, and exhibition opportunities. Almost two decades ago now, I also did Skowhegan and the Vermont Studio Center, their prestige gave me the street cred that helped me, as a black artist, to open some doors in the art world.
Anna Mikaela: I loved following your work in Martha’s Vineyard at the AOTV residency on Instagram. The whole experience looked very empowering in a near-spiritual way. Tell me more about it.
Ayana: Thank you. AOTV is a two-person collaborative residency, which I went to with my friend and fellow artist Tsedaye Makonnen. In addition, it is a black organization founded by a black woman which felt empowering. We stayed in a historic location, on the Black History Trail on the Vineyard, Shearer Cottage, run by two of black women. One of them, Emily, was a member of The Polar Bears, who took us under their wing. f The group is a 74-year tradition of African American women (it now includes all genders and races) swimming and holding space for each other every morning on the island. Through this morning ritual and new friendships, we were surrounded by love, affection, and support. The restorative experience allowed our work to just pour out of us! I came to realize that I had been making art under duress in New York and my financial worries, handling emails and social media, and the art world patriarchal environment had created a lot of stress in my life. AOTV flew us to the island, supported us financially, and to conclude the residency they offered us the opportunity to exhibit the work we made while in residency, which motivated us further to make meaningful work
Anna Mikaela: For those who do not know, how do performance artists support themselves?
Ayana: Think of performance artists like comedians. What do they do for money when they are first starting out? Answer: Anything they can while still practicing their craft at night. A lot of the people I know in performance art work with kids, usually with an "art on the cart" program where they are contracted through a non-profit which means that they literally do the same job as an art teacher but without benefits. It is a way for schools to add art into their curriculum cheaply, useful for those who have had arts cut. I fell into this category before being invited to teach at Brown.
Of course, most of the time we do get paid to perform. At the start of your career each performance pays $0 to $25-50, and, as you move forward $100-150, to $500, and $2500 when you are invited by universities and museums.
Anna Mikaela: If you were reborn as an artist of your choice, living or dead, who would it be?
Ayana: Lorraine O’Grady. Hands down.
Anna Mikaela: Where can we see your work?
Ayana: New and old works will be included in I Came by Boat so Meet Me at the Beach at August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh (Jan 24-March 17). On February 5, I will be performing in response to Luscious at the Bell Gallery of Brown University. Luscious is a retrospective of works by my mentor Wendy Edwards. In addition, I need to shout-out the book project Institution as a Verb documenting Panoply Performance Laboratory activities 2012-2018 that I am co-editing. And, in 2021, I will be co-curating and performing in an intergenerational performance series at the National Portrait Gallery which will feature Lorraine O'Grady and Sur Rodney Sur among others. Please come through!