The Rising Dallas Artist Spotlighting Black Life—And Black Joy—In the South

Evita Tezeno had a bucolic childhood, ensconced in a predominantly Black community in small-town Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Despite the sociopolitical tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, “I grew up in a bubble,” she admits. “I wasn’t exposed to other races until my senior year of high school. I didn’t know what prejudice was.”  

Today the 62-year-old Dallas artist draws upon these fond memories in her exuberant collage paintings, employing elaborately patterned hand-painted papers and found objects to depict everyday scenes of Black life: prim ladies waiting at a bus stop, young girls nattering away, women hanging laundry, couples linking arms for a stroll, gazing lovingly at each other, or dressed in their finest for a night of dancing. 

In the South, she continues, “I hate to say, the stereotype is that Black people are depressed, sad, and exposed to a lot of racial prejudice and suppression. But we have joy too—and I wanted to portray that happiness and togetherness I grew up with.”

Her uplifting work has lately been gaining attention in the art crowd, both regionally and across the country. Her first solo museum exhibition opens at the Houston Museum of African American Culture next week, and earlier this month she was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious grants for artists. 

This week she’s gearing up for a busy Dallas Art Fair, during which her work will be on display with gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and in a related pop-up exhibition at the upscale shopping mall NorthPark Center; she’ll also be interviewed by Vanity Fair art columnist Nate Freeman onstage at the Nasher Sculpture Center on Friday. 

All this recognition has arrived three decades into Tezeno’s practice. “It feels like an avalanche, it’s suddenly happening so fast,” she says. She’d wanted to be an artist since childhood and struggled for many years. “But I knew that this is what I was gonna do. I held on.”

Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell called seeing Tezeno’s pieces early last year “such a discovery. Evita’s work brings an authentic Dallas voice to the fair. It feels like a diary of her life, immortalizing the special and daily moments while celebrating a Black America. It’s part of a Southern tradition that values the simple things in life.”   

Tezeno has witnessed the Dallas art scene boom in recent years, in tandem with the country’s fifth fastest-growing city. Galleries have thrived, and museums have drawn and organized starry exhibitions, featuring the likes of Cindy Sherman, Christian Dior, and Yayoi Kusama. And many works in those shows are held by local collectors, some of whom are among the world’s most important. Meanwhile the Dallas Art Fair has expanded immensely too, from 30 exhibitors to nearly 100 (including notable overseas galleries) in the past 15 years, with record-breaking attendance numbers before COVID. 

It’s a stark difference from when Tezeno first arrived here. “I would say it was nonfunctioning back in the ’80s,” she says. In the 1990s, she would have to hit the road with a group of mainly male Black artists to offer their pieces to galleries as far as New York City. “Before the internet,” she smiles broadly, “we would put the artworks in the back of the van and pull up to all these different galleries. It was like show and tell.” Today, she says, “the Dallas art scene is really brewing—there’s something in the arts going on almost every night.”

Last year Tezeno’s Joy, Compassion, Generosity (2022), depicting three Black women amid a burst of spring flowers, was acquired by the Dallas Art Museum from the fair, making it her first work owned by a museum. “Evita has such an amazing mastery of harmony and beauty,” enthused Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. “Her work is so immediately visually striking, with such attention to texture and detail in her use of individually manipulated and collaged paper. It vibrates with a beautiful, generous spirit.”

Speaking of spirits, Tezeno’s style came about in a rather unorthodox way. She says that in 1998 an angel bearing a book of sketches appeared to her in a dream, urging her to change her Impressionist style. She did, and the following year she won commissions to design posters for both the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Essence Music Festival. She began to show more of her work, but the Dallas scene kept her at arm’s length: “They said my work was too design-y, it wasn’t edgy enough. So I went elsewhere.” She landed at galleries in Georgia, Maryland, New York, and Ohio. 

In the meantime, she made a living as a vegan chef. Tezeno went vegan in the late 1980s, prompted by her faith as a Seventh-day Adventist. Her change in diet caused an uproar in her family, for whom each year’s highlight was the preparation of freshly slaughtered meats for the months ahead: hog’s head cheese, boudin, cracklings. “My family thought I’d lost my mind, that I was gonna just shrivel up and die,” she remembers. But she capitalized on being an early adopter of what was then a fringe movement (especially in that region), even hosting a raw-food cooking show in the early 2010s.

Then some notable supporters altered her trajectory. In 2018 Denzel Washington purchased a staggering eight of Tezeno’s works from a New York City gallery—a single move that enabled her to quit working as a chef and focus on art full-time. In 2020 Samuel L. Jackson struck up a chat on Instagram; a few months later he gifted his wife a piece for their 40th anniversary. 

Those sales allowed her to move into a much larger studio space, where she could make more sizable works—at the prompting of Los Angeles art dealer Luis De Jesus (who also contacted her via social media during the pandemic). Her first show at his gallery sold out before it was even installed. 

Audiences have found a connection to Tezeno’s works, although they’re based heavily on her own life and memories. Her process likewise has a personal dimension: Many women in her family were quilters and sewers, and her patterned papers frequently mimic fabric. “I quilt with paper,” she explains. “That’s what quilting is, laying different patterns together to see if they work.” Upon her grandmother’s passing, she inherited her button collection, which she now incorporates into the clothing in her artworks.

Tezeno’s gallery has dubbed her work “contemporary folk art,” nodding to the narrative threads often present in folk art, while her graphic style echoes influences like Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, and Romare Bearden. That perhaps reflects her training as a graphic-design student in the days before computers: “We did everything by hand, cut and paste,” she recalls. 

Tezeno’s work has a timelessness, according to Brodbeck, and it engages in a dialogue with the past. “She’s very interested in early-20th-century collage, from Picasso to Bearden,” the curator says. “Her classical, harmonious proportions are the same that you see in Picasso’s return to order.” And a spirituality implicit in Tezeno’s works is representative of what Brodbeck has observed among other local African American artists. “She calls out a lot to her spiritual upbringing and brings in a lot of vernacular culture. It’s important to us, being a Southern museum, to collect works by African American artists that bring in those touchstones.”

Indeed the American South has a strong presence in Tezeno’s work, with shotgun houses peeking from the backgrounds and couples dancing and singing around guitars. “That Southern living, that Southern hospitality—that’s all I know,” the artist notes. “I grew up with a slow pace of life, slow food, and I try to translate that into my work. And I think I’m doing it because people from the South say it makes them feel like home, like a warm hug.” Even with a gallery in Los Angeles (where each of her shows has sold out) and a rising profile in New York City, she has no plans to leave the South.

Ironically, only in the last few years has Tezeno made her name known in Dallas. “I don’t want to be negative, but I was not appreciated here at all,” she remarks candidly. “People said, ‘Oh, we didn’t even know she was here.’” She points out, though, that she’s in good company. “Norah Jones and Erykah Badu, they had to leave Dallas to get recognized and now they’re celebrated here.”  

Brodbeck too admits that until recently, Tezeno was virtually unknown in the local arts community. “Honestly, it wasn’t until her current Los Angeles dealer picked up her work that she really gained any traction. That’s really a horrible injustice because she’s clearly such a natural talent.” The curator has since led VIP tours at the museum that have sparked “a frenzy” to acquire Tezeno’s work. “Because her work hits your heart,” she reflects. “Her work is so healing and positive, and that’s very much needed in Dallas, like in so many cities.”

The artist agrees that her work speaks to a particularly dire moment. “People gravitate to my message because it’s positive. In this world we have so much negativity, and people see in my work hope and happiness.” Her pieces sold briskly in 2020—a period of racial unrest and COVID-related restrictions—mostly to East Coast buyers, but now curators and museum directors are calling. It has Tezeno slightly flummoxed. “My work has gotten better, but I’ve been doing the same style, the same message,” she says. Perhaps the world has changed to meet her art, I suggest. “I love that,” she brightens. “That’s what has happened!”  

This year will bring another solo show at Luis De Jesus in August, in addition to appearances at the Armory Show in New York City in September and Art Basel Miami Beach in December. And she’s hoping to find downtime to go deeper into printmaking and maybe try her hand at sculpture. Until then, Tezeno is staying close to what got her to this point. “I’m just a simple woman from the South who loves life,” she proclaims. “I want to share my experiences and my joy. This world has not changed me or made me plastic. I want to show people my humanity.”