Kevin Jerome Everson

Place: Mansfield

Born: 1965

Biography:

Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson's films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work. "Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else." Everson frequently employs hand-held camerawork and uses 16mm to create many of his films. His work has been the subject of retrospective screenings at Media City Film Festival (2011), Tate Modern (2017), online at Mubi (2018), and Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou (2019)