Ceirra Evans
Come Rain or Shine
June 06 - July 19, 2025
215 N Limestone
In Eastern Kentucky, climate change isn’t a distant theory—it’s a lived reality. Floods rip through hollers. Snowstorms send families to the Dollar General for the bare essentials. Out here, weather isn’t small talk. It’s a signal. A barometer. A force that calls people to prepare, to adapt, to bear witness.
In Come Rain or Shine, Ceirra Evans returns again to the lives and landscapes of her upbringing—not to romanticize or flatten them, but to honor their everyday complexity, their humor, and their enduring relationship with the land and its changes. As much about people as they are about place, these paintings depict the way weather settles in the bones and dictates the shape of a week, a season, a life.
Full of warm detail, affection, and sharp wit, Evans’s work shows lives lived in rhythm with rural environments that are both beautiful and brutal, intimate and vast. A woman plants roses in splintering heat. A family gathers on a trailer porch to watch a storm roll in—the danger strong, but the pull of witnessing it even stronger. A farmer greets the mail carrier at the end of the gravel road—not out of routine, but out of a shared understanding that out here, connection is survival.
Evans paints with love, but never with illusion. Her work is grounded in deep familiarity—these are people she knows, or could know; stories pulled from her own upbringing in the Appalachian foothills. As a queer artist, her gaze challenges caricature and patronization alike, offering a vision of rural life that is honest, complex, and political by nature. The absurdity of blow-drying a plant in such bitter weather lands not as mockery, but as survival. The moment of sitting still to watch a storm feels less like recklessness and more like reverence.
As the political climate shifts alongside the literal one, Come Rain or Shine asks: who gets remembered in times of change? Who gets recorded, painted, cared for? Evans’s answer is clear. These people—her people—deserve to be seen in full. This exhibition is a document, a witness, a love letter, and a warning. If the storms are getting stronger, the stories we tell about each other have to be, too.
-Belle Townsend