Evita Tezeno Breaks Through The Dallas-based artist will make her first appearance at Dallas Art Fair with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. BY DARRYL RATCLIFF PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUIS MARTINEZ
Evita Tezeno, Joy, Compassion, and Generosity, 2022, mixed media collage on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, to be shown at Dallas Art Fair. Photograph by Lawrence Jenkins.
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vita Tezeno is no longer being ignored. Not nationally, where she is selling out art fair booths including NADA Miami (a satellite art fair held during Art Basel Miami) and having widely acclaimed solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, and finally not locally, as the longtime Dallas-based artist will be one of two artists showing at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles booth at the Dallas Art Fair this month. When asked about the secret to her resurgence and keeping faith during the decades when the art world seemed like it had moved past her, Tezeno replies, “I just held my mouth right.” Tezeno, a Black woman who was raised in Port Arthur, Texas, but has lived more than half of her life in Dallas, has been a practicing artist for over thirty years. She is known for her multimedia collages utilizing painted pieces of paper to produce images of everyday Black people, often rooted in her childhood memories. Tezeno first achieved success
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Evita Tezeno in her studio.
in the late ’90s when she was the first female artist to create a poster for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. That led to a steady career with an East Coast gallery that consistently sold her work, but it did not lead to the type of breakthrough she had hoped for. “One of my life goals is to be in a museum collection. It is an honor to be in front of thousands of people who admire your work and study your work and wonder what you are thinking,” Tezeno says. So she took a calculated risk and pulled back from showing at galleries that couldn’t help her with her big goal. Then a New York gallery sold her art to Denzel Washington, and Samuel L Jackson purchased a piece as an anniversary gift for his wife. Then an unexpected message on Instagram came her way from the very type of gallery she was hoping to attract—Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. “I’m a praying woman. I said, ‘Lord I wanted it to happen,’ and it happened,” Tezeno says.
