KENYA EVANS
Born 1974, Sumter, South Carolina; lives in Houston, Texas Kenya Evans’s paintings and sculptures convey an intentionally didactic message about history’s tendency to repeat itself. In their sampling of diverse references, these pseudohistorical collages, which combine texts from children’s books with popular toys, and comics with Islamic proverbs, comment on the reductive simplicity of history books, while asserting their own critical analysis of the foundations on which the United States was built.
In the painting Untitled (Overseer) (2003), the canvas is neatly covered in trademarked cotton logos. A text reads: “Nearby stood the overseer. It was his job to see that the slaves did their work well. If they didn’t, he used the big whip he always carried.” The simplified text is made absurd by the illustration, which shows a slave on the ground with one arm raised in self-defense from an imaginary whip being wielded by a drooling sharklike Transformers robot. Evans’s use of a cartoon character to represent the overseer might at first seem to trivialize the scene; however, the creature is mechanized—uncrushable—inferring the continued oppression of African Americans in contemporary society by the “machinery” of racism.
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Untitled (Overseer), 2003. Acrylic, latex, marker, and graphite on canvas, 30 x 38 in. (76.2 x 96.5 cm). Collection of the artist Biennial Voices: |