Evelyn Anderson lives and works in Charlotte, NC. As an artist and educator, she holds a BA in Arts Practice from Stanford University. At Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, she developed the museum’s first Artist-in-Residence program, engaging over 78,000+ children and families in hands-on art activities.

Evelyn’s Artwork

Evelyn is an oil painter and poet whose intimate family portraits fold geography to reassemble an image of home. Her work is guided by Lenca traditions that hold that the spirits of children live in the water, and that it is our duty to protect them. Anderson seeks relationship with these spirits by painting them in their many forms—ocean, river, cloud, flesh, blood.  

By conducting interviews with older generations of family members in her mother’s hometown in Honduras, Anderson paints to create a visual archive of family oral histories. Rooted in a region where climate change, land privatization, and monocultures have erased numerous ancestral sites such as rivers and forests, Anderson yearns for sites that no longer exist. In turn, she depicts flora, fauna, and bodies of water that she never knew, exploring the memory of blood and the narratives it can tell.  By superimposing family members onto these collaged sites, she is able to redress the fragmentation of communities caused by economically-driven immigration. By crystalizing moments of familial unity and belonging, Anderson’s paintings replace fracture with intimacy—barriers with transcendence.