Kenya Evans

artist

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 pseudo historical 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. Evans is also a hip-hop musician, and his use of the medium itself a repository of black experience and a primary means of black expression in his artwork functions to create a multilayered juxtaposition of historical and contemporary situations, making it all too clear that little has changed. Evans is a member of Otabenga Jones & Associates.