Nigerian-born British artist Mary Evans has been chosen to serve as the next director of London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, effective October 4 of this year. She is the first Black person to occupy the position. Evans arrives from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, where she has for the past five years headed the undergraduate fine arts program. She will fill the role left vacant by Kieren Reed, who has led the institution since 2018 and is departing on sabbatical.
Evans in a statement noted, “It will be a privilege to work in an environment that offers a transformative education to emerging artists, where students and staff can express themselves and take risks in an increasingly equitable environment at this important moment when diverse knowledges are relevant and necessary.”
Prior to joining Chelsea College of Arts, Evans taught at Central Saint Martins, also in London. She holds a BA from the Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, and an MA in fine art from Goldsmiths College. Evans undertook a two-year postgraduate residency at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam. Originally trained as a painter, she shifted to paper as her preferred medium, deploying it in large-scale installations that address issues central to her own heritage and to the African diaspora. A solo exhibition of her work, “GILT,” is currently on view at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Previous exhibitions include group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and the Arnolfini in Bristol, England, as well as the Third Guangzhou Triennale.
Evans comes to the Slade in the wake of an especially fraught time for the school, which has in the past few years been forced to reckon with the Covid-19 pandemic and student protests over institutional racism, the latter of which were followed by an independent investigation which concluded that the school’s “recruitment panels are not sufficiently diverse and recruitment processes are not consistently applied.”