Kevin Jerome Everson
1965–
In his feature-length films and dozens of short-form pieces, Kevin Jerome Everson captures moments of everyday life that are by turns quotidian and suffused with significance—often both at once. Everson’s camera frequently is trained on working- class African Americans, and his films, made at sites such as a factory and a dry cleaning facility, present what he has described as “things that people take for granted.” His use of long, uninterrupted takes and the inclusion of archival footage lend these works a reportorial quality. Yet Everson’s films are not documentaries. Instead, he complicates what viewers might assume to be a disinterested or transparent point of view: seeming actuality is interspersed with scripted scenarios, found or archival material is intermixed with contemporary footage, and the mundane is punctuated by drama. Because the line between truth and fabrication is often blurred in Everson’s films, viewers are left to disentangle events and connect actions that occur across space and time, distinguishing fact from fiction for themselves.
Ninety-Three is a silent film titled for the age of its subject, an elderly man who is shown trying to blow out ninety-three candles on a large birthday cake and finally succeeding. The elegiac and formal qualities of this work are most apparent when the gallery, illuminated with light from the candles on the screen, goes entirely dark at the conclusion. The man, a relative who has appeared in other of the artist’s films, takes on symbolic significance as Everson conjures from the simplest of scenes a meditation on mortality and the passage of time.
Introduction
Kevin Jerome Everson (born February 1, 1965) is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Everson's films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work. "Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else."
Everson frequently employs hand-held camerawork and uses 16mm to create many of his films. His work has been the subject of retrospective screenings at Media City Film Festival (2011), Tate Modern (2017), online at Mubi (2018), and Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou (2019)
Wikidata identifier
Q28869355
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 29, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, cinematographer, painter, photographer, professor, sculptor, video artist
ULAN identifier
500294257
Names
Kevin Jerome Everson, Kevin J. Everson
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 29, 2025.
