Trevor Anderson-Evans (b. 1995, Hoboken, NJ) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist who works between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Colombia, South America. His practice spans acrylic, oil, collage, cut canvas, watercolor, and mixed media. He incorporates found textiles, paper, and gesture-based mark-making, including basketball dribble patterns, to build layered surfaces that examine the lived realities of Black identity across different regions and cultures. Anderson-Evans brings painting into conversation with sculptural form, video, and fashion, creating compositions that shift between image and object while moving between concealment and revelation.
His influences include Sam Gilliam, Mark Bradford, Juan Logan, and Thornton Dial, along with the imaginative and future-oriented lens of Afrofuturism. Architecture and design shape the structural logic of his work, which considers how narratives are assembled, eroded, and reconstructed over time. His recent projects expand into shaped canvases and installation-based forms that echo the irregular borders of states, nations, and cultural histories. Through this evolving practice, Anderson-Evans invites viewers to reflect on how history and perception meet at the surface of a painting and how the visible and invisible coexist within it.
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My practice examines how processes such as layering, erasure, accumulation, and reconstruction can serve as metaphors for the development of Black identity and collective memory. I treat each surface as an active archive, a place where fragments of personal and historical experience interact and reshape one another. Through acrylic, oil, collage, cut and reassembled canvas, found textiles, paper, and basketball-dribble mark-making, I build works that hold both physical texture and conceptual weight. Techniques such as scraping, washing, and breaking down earlier paintings allow the work to reveal what has been obscured and to expose the seams of narratives that are often taken for granted.
Living in the Northern and Southern United States and now in South America has made me attentive to how the perception of Blackness shifts across cultural contexts even as it remains rooted in similar patterns of erasure and resilience. My paintings respond to this reality by creating visual systems where structure and disruption exist side by side. This approach reflects the instability and complexity of memory, as well as the ongoing negotiation of identity across different places.
Inspired by Mark Bradford’s engagement with urban material and Sam Gilliam’s improvisational use of color and form, I work with torn canvas, repurposed textiles, and layered surfaces to explore both physical and psychological landscapes. Architectural references, fashion, and science fiction shape the formal direction of the work. Afrofuturism plays a central role by offering a way to create images that are felt before they are fully recognized, images that function as links between memory, imagination, and the unseen connections that define lived experience.
