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.
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