Questions for Artworks: A Galaxy Tour with Joanna Evans 

Floor 6

Shifting perspective from gallery to galaxy, this program is a creative experiment in looking and writing, imagining the Shifting Landscapes exhibition as a constellation of celestial bodies. Participants are invited to become inter-planetary researchers exploring the artworks in this galaxy. How does time move in the work? Is the atmosphere thick, sulfurous, or non-existent? Does the sun ever set? Part performance, part guided observation, this session is inspired by Elinor Fuchs’s essay “Visit to a Small Planet,” a dramaturgical analysis imagining plays as planets. Through guided questions and free writing participants will enter and explore the complex worlds of artworks. 

Joanna Evans is a theater artist and performance scholar working in New York and Cape Town. They are a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at New York University, researching the intersection of improvised performance and environmental subsistence in South Africa and the southern United States. Their creative practice is organized around collaboration and open-ended inquiry, and their plays have toured throughout South Africa, as well as to international festivals in Italy, Germany, Iran, Hungary, Réunion, and the United States. They are a 2024–25 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Program Fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.