Ayana Evans: Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do is the first museum survey exhibition of work by Brooklyn-based artist and performer Ayana Evans. Celebrating Evans’s dedication to live arts, the exhibition brings together new and recent videos, ephemera, live performances, and events that invite audience participation.

Originally trained as a painter, Evans has established an unapologetic and emotionally invigorating voice as a performance artist over the last two decades. Questioning social hierarchies and inequities through her work, she creates and protects spaces where people can be their most authentic selves. Since her early guerilla-style performances in which Evans wore a neon green, zebra-striped catsuit in public to test self-confidence and audience reaction,—her work has become a vehicle for laying bare the ways class, race, gender, and sex are inextricably linked to broader social attitudes. Through collective experiences, Evans generates work that is accessible, humorous, challenging, and often profound.

Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do includes documentation of works that span decades of Evans’s creative process: videos of guerilla performances presented on New York City streets; works staged for audiences in Venice, Michigan, and Montreal; and ephemera including a sign that reads, “I JUST CAME HERE TO FIND A HUSBAND,” which Evans has worn serially in public appearances. A coat rack draped with yellow feather boas—adornments that often figure in Evans’s performances—comes with an open invitation for visitors to don them and walk a red carpet.

Ayana Evans: Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.