Artist Database

The director of UCL Slade School of Art and celebrated artist Mary Evans uses brown paper and other disposable materials to consider sites and narratives about place and belonging. Raised in England, Evans uses the socio-political and historical frameworks of diaspora, migration, and global exchange to reflect on narratives of Black resilience. She has received numerous commissions, awards, and residencies, including a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. in 2010, the Arts Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation in 2014, and a 2022 installation at the Meta offices in London. Her work was featured in the 2016 edition of the EVA International Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh in Limerick, Ireland. Her principal motif is the silhouette, a well-known European visual device, reappropriated to make the black body visible as a site for historical and contemporary narratives of resilience, mobility, geography, and memory.