Our Blues and Her Name is TREE – Regina Evans

“Our Blues” is a healing arts textile installation highlighting the sacredness and dynamic beauty of Black women. Black women are the holders of varied coded chapters, divine feelings, insistent jubilations,
and spirited pathways. From the melancholy of a poetic blue musical note to the nurturing blue
of the wise ocean deep…

This is “Our Blues”.

My artistry sits upon a tapestry of social justice, writing, poetry, textiles art, and healing. My love work largely surrounds the necessary empowerment of women, with a focus upon Black women and girls. I worked for over two decades as an Abolitionist in the fight against child/youth sex trafficking and it was in this realm where I began to see the many roads of my creativity fold, bend and blend into one another. I am uncompromising in my belief that artistry utilized with the power of love is one of the greatest weapons and soothing balms in the healing of brokenness sustained through violence and oppression.

Creativity is insistent and pure in its zeal to create sustainable pathways to freedom. And at the center of it all sits the notion of traveling to the roots of fractures to ultimately access effective healing. There is a Gullah saying: “Mus take cyear da root fa heal da tree.” Without the truth of healing, the beloved community circles around in its own pain. Through my art and creativity, it is my deepest desire to be a part of swinging systemic injustices into ultimate liberty.

– Regina Evans

Her name is TREE (Costume)

As with most of my work this costume represents a journey. This costume belongs to a character named TREE who is the narrator in my upcoming magical realism novel of the same name. The novel is born out of my stage play “Passage” which was also based upon the enslaved. The novel is an excavation of my work as an Anti-Trafficking Abolitionist, and travels between past-day slavery and modern-day slavery.

TREE is a Momma Spirit who is approximately 5,000 years old in this lifetime. She is a medicine woman who utilizes fabric as her major methodology for conjuring healing. She is the creator of beautiful and healing garments for the oppressed and denied. (Note: The fabric industry was deeply complicit in all things slavery. Great wealth was accumulated as cheaply made basic fabrics were sold in bulk to enslavers for purposes of “work” clothes for the enslaved.)

TREE is a birther of destiny for those who have been enslaved/trafficked. She is a listener, a recorder of their stories, a healer of wounds, and a pathway to freedom.

She is physically large, deep chocolate skin, wearied beautiful, and utilizes her five left hand root fingers to manifest magic. She is a lover of yellow flowers (the why of it all is known only to her), and she wears a bruised yellow flower in her hair. She can often be seen carrying lanterns that emit both light and shadow. She lives in a mystical and healing way station land that can only be accessed at the sound of her strong calling.

TREE a wise justice teacher, and she is not a sufferer of fools or foolishness. She can often be found sip slurping sacred teas whilst whispering fierce spells of protection for women and girls who have been enslaved/trafficked.

Of slavery, she describes it as follows:

“Well, in truth, it ain’t something, it’s nothing. And it just blinds itself with its own putrefied funk and weakness. And squats right down inside its own lie. Paints its walls with whitewash and sinking sand. And calls its nothing self the kingdom come of everything. It’s real good at the trick of believing in the actuality of ain’t nothing really there. Got ta have its nothingness squarely pressed down on the neck of the something. Scrambling its air. Till the neck of the something ain’t nothing but controlled confusion and wounds. And then nothing? It slithers. And steals its darkness into the light of the something, and places a crown of bright sacred bones on its own head. And the upper world bows. At nothing. And the multitudes of the somethings? They weep…for us all.”

I invite you to spend time with her in silence. Listen to her atmosphere of justice, insistence, and healing. Give thanks.

The costume was originally made and utilized for a performance for my LMCC Artist Residency as I activated my writing studio space on Governors Island.

– Regina Evans 

Regina Y. Evans is an award winning Social Justice Playwright/Actor, Poet, Entrepreneur, Costume Designer, and Installation Artist. Her creative work largely focuses upon the healing of Black girls and women, the historical commodification of the Black female womb, and the fight against child sex trafficking. 

Her work has been recognized by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Oakland City Council, San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking, BroadwayWorld San Francisco Awards, SF Fringe Festival Awards, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, among others.

Previously, Evans founded and ran two creative arts healing spaces for young survivors of sex trafficking in Oakland, CA—Regina’s Door and Conjure and Mend—through 2021.