Faith Evans returned earlier this month from two weeks at the Château d’Orquevaux in France, where she was accepted into the highly competitive residency program and awarded a Denis Diderot Grant, all based on her portfolio, her Instagram page, and her statement of intention. She was one of 20 residents from all over the world.
What makes that an especially remarkable achievement is that between approximately 1990 and 2020 she not only didn’t make art, she didn’t even think about art. As she said during a conversation at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, where she teaches art and curates exhibitions, “My art thing was buried for 30-something years. I have a young daughter who is an artist. I worked for an artist. I wasn’t seeing the signs to get back in even though every time I would see their work, my heart would knot.”
Born and raised in East Hampton, her passion for art dates to kindergarten, when her teacher was impressed by her drawings. “I remember thinking it came easily to me.” As a student at the John M. Marshall Elementary School in the 1970s, “Things were very different then. I chose to stay in the art room instead of recess because recess wasn’t very much fun for me.” As a Black child, “I didn’t look like all the other kids.” The art room remained her refuge through high school.
She developed a portfolio, applied to art schools, and was accepted at the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology. But her parents had other ideas. “They said I needed a real education, a real degree, and a real job, so I had to turn down those schools. I wondered what I was going to do. I packed up all my art and put it away.”
She spent one unhappy year at Rhode Island College in Providence, then decided to give California a try and transferred to California State University, Northridge. She studied radio, TV, and film, and after graduation worked in television for 13 years.
First, she landed an internship at a small post-production company. “Since they couldn’t pay me, I couldn’t keep doing it.” Her boss suggested she try advertising since it was lucrative.
Next came ABC/Disney, where she wrote network advertising. Living in West Hills in the San Fernando Valley, she would commute to Burbank. Meanwhile, she was married and had her first child when, in 2004, her husband wanted to move to central California because of an employment opportunity.
She found work with a Fox affiliate in the area. “It was a small station. We would get Fox programming, and local programming as well, so they had a lot of local advertisers.” As part of the station’s small production team, she wrote and produced commercials.
Ms. Evans missed the East Coast, however, and was ready for a change in 2007, so she returned to East Hampton, where she found work doing administrative work for a private estate. “I left that in 2019. My kids were in middle school and needed me more, and the job was demanding a lot from me. I needed time away, so I took a temporary amicable pause, planning to return in six months.” The sixth month was March 2020, so returning to the job was out of the question.
“I spent a lot of quality time with my teenage children during the pandemic. One thing that came out of it was they asked me to write a memoir. I said I will, and you can pass it to your kids, and they can pass it to their kids. We can start a tradition.”
She began with kindergarten, “I went through each grade, my ailments, my friend who died, then after third grade there was a big bullying thing, and then I began to remember and write about when I used to make art. All these emotions and memories about how much I loved it were coming back.”
Because schools were closed, her children’s art supplies were scattered about their home. “I asked my daughter if I could borrow a sketch pad and a pencil. I started drawing and I couldn’t stop; it was page after page. Looking into my family’s history, I did pencil portraits of my grandparents and my great-grandfather.”
Ms. Evans first showed her work at the Islip Arts Council in “She/Her/Hers” in March 2023. A slew of group exhibitions followed, including “Unfinished Revelations” at Raynham Hall in Oyster Bay, the Black Film Festival at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, and “Celebrating Creatives of Color” at The Church in Sag Harbor, all in 2025. “In View: A Featured Collection by Black Artists,” organized by the Islip Arts Council, has her work in East Islip through Sunday.
In addition to creating her own work, she was asked by Bonnie Cannon, the executive director of the recreational center, to curate exhibitions there. “I had never done it before, but why not? I say yes to anything art. I’m proud to say we’ve sold pieces from every show I’ve curated there.”
Spreading her wings, for last year’s Black History Month, she curated an exhibition titled “African Americans and Labor” for the Islip Arts Council. The show, part of its “Black Creativity” series, highlighted themes ranging from agricultural labor to entrepreneurship and featured work by 14 artists, including Ms. Evans.
As for the residency in France, she came upon the application while trolling through Instagram. “I thought, why not? To be honest, I thought I’d never get in.” She applied in July, and after three months passed, she assumed she had been rejected. “But as I was walking into the center one day, I looked at my email and it said, ‘Congratulations, you’re going to France.’ “
“They gave me a studio, which overlooked a pond, and meals were provided. Because when you’re an artist and you’re in the zone, you just have to remember to go eat. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. I met really cool people, and it was so quiet I didn’t have to worry about anything but creating.”
Throughout her career, Ms. Evans has been a pencil artist. Before France her work was black and white, but once there she added colored pencils and pastel to her drawings and did five new pieces. “That type of drawing usually takes weeks.”
One of the drawings, a meticulous rendering of the school’s art store, stayed in France as a permanent piece to hang in the chateau’s Diderot Gallery. Another depicts Ms. Evans in a winter coat, carrying a portfolio and wearing a backpack, outside the chateau, looking up at the imposing edifice. It captures a moment both exciting and poignant.
Back home she has resumed her busy life at the recreational center as well as at OLA of Eastern Long Island, where she is a crisis counselor for its program Youth Connect, an anonymous helpline for middle school children and teenagers.
Her daughter Elyse is a senior at the California Institute of the Arts, and her daughter Delani is a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She is married to Dr. David Lado of East End Pediatrics.
