Evans has explored the connections between music, language, memory, identity, and collectivity in his sculptures and installations for over thirty years. When Evans arrived in New York City in the late 1980s, he became involved in two scenes that would form the basis for his artistic practice: activism and dance music.

Don’t Leave Me This Way/Never Can Say Goodbye is a continuation of this practice as well as an extension of his most recent public installation Songs for a Memorial, on view at the New York City AIDS Memorial in New York’s Greenwich Village from June 1 through September 6, 2022. By appropriating and combining the titles of two disco anthems tied inextricably to the period surrounding the onset and height of the AIDS epidemic, Evans weaves narratives of both individual and collective memory and history that examine complex relationships between loss, love, sadness, joy, and celebration—paradoxes that exist at the crux of his practice.

Steven Evans (b. 1964, Key West, FL) earned a BFA in photography at the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada in 1989. He is an artist, writer, curator, and Executive Director of the award-winning arts organization FotoFest International, which founded and sponsors the first and longest-running international Biennial of Photography and New Media Art in the United States.