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 documentation of recent and past works, ephemera, live performance commissions, and opportunities for audiences to become participants.
Questioning social hierarchies and inequities through her work, Evans shows up “ready to do the most” to create spaces where people—the artist included—can be their most authentic selves. Originally trained as a painter, Evans has established an unapologetic and emotionally invigorating voice as a performance artist over the last two decades. Her first live works were active social experiments: For Operation Catsuit (2012–present), Evans wore a now-signature neon green, zebra-striped catsuit in public, seeking to test her own self-confidence, while friends recorded videos that show how unsuspecting audiences received her. Since then, these performances have become a vehicle through which Evans lays bare and challenges the ways class, race, gender, and sex are inextricably linked to broader social attitudes.
Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do includes documentation of works that span over 20 years of Evans’s creative process. Viewers will encounter videos of guerilla performances presented on New York City streets; works staged for audiences in Venice, Italy; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Montreal in Canada, and in digital realms.
The presentation also features ephemera including a sign that reads, “I JUST CAME HERE TO FIND A HUSBAND,” which Evans has worn serially in public appearances. Made for this exhibition, an interactive work titled Recognition (St. Louis Sugar) (2026), consists of a red carpet lined with velvet ropes and brass stanchions placed in the Museum’s lobby. A coat rack draped with feather boas serves as an open invitation for visitors to don them and have their own red carpet moment.
Programming for Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do includes a new performance by the artist commissioned by CAM, and additional events.
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.
