Members of New York City’s art community are fundraising to support performance artist and professor Ayana Evans and her partner after a fire tore through the top floor of their six-story Brooklyn apartment on Monday afternoon, September 8. The blaze destroyed nearly everything they owned and displaced them from their home with just a few belongings in a matter of several hours, Evans told Hyperallergic in a phone call from a hotel where she is currently living. She said she had never experienced anything like it after more than two decades in New York.“There’s a lot of things that went wrong,” Evans said. “It was not like the movies where it’s very clear it’s an emergency,” she added, recalling how the building’s smoke alarms had not even gone off when she and her neighbors cleared their homes.Exterior view of the fire, which ripped through the top floor of a six-story residential building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens (photo by and courtesy Ayana Evans)The blaze broke out shortly before 1pm, after a building contractor had been called to repair a roof leak that was causing mold. Evans had been working from home and emailing with a curator about an upcoming project when she and her partner saw smoke coming from the roof. The contractor initially requested a few buckets of water, but then asked them to call the fire department. Firefighters had the blaze under control by 2pm, according to an X post by the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). A spokesperson for FDNY told Hyperallergic that officials have still not determined the cause of the fire, which ripped through the building’s cockloft — a combustible void space between the top floor ceiling and the roof that can frequently be a hazardous vessel for hidden fires. Authorities have reportedly arrested the contractor for illegal use of a blowtorch.An online fundraiser to help Evans and her family offset the costs of relocating and recovering has so far raised more than $23,500 from 316 supporters. Photos of Evans’s apartment in the aftermath of the fire showed a collapsed roof and soot covering the unit. (photos by and courtesy Ayana Evans)Known for her trademark performance uniform consisting of an unforgettable neon green zebra-striped catsuit, Evans works as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, Fordham University, and New York University when she is not staging guerrilla-style community shows at venues like El Museo del Barrio, the Weeksville Heritage Center, the Barnes Foundation, and the Crystal Bridges Museum. Her work, which has included the ongoing relational performance series Operation Catsuit (2012–) and a non-traditional career fair known as C.R.E.A.M (Cash Rules Everything Around Me), is rooted in inclusive community-building and confronting issues that systemically affect people based on race, class, sex, gender, and sexuality.One of Ayana Evans’s guerilla-style performances at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy (photo by Glorija Blazinsek)Although a lot of Evans’s work is kept in an off-site storage space, the fire destroyed items essential to her art practice, like her camera, unused backdrops, costumes, and work she had made at the Yaddo arts residency program in 2021.“I really thought, like at worst, that maybe my kitchen would be messed up,” she said.Photos and video of her apartment in the aftermath show a collapsed roof and soot covering nearly every square inch of the unit. It was one of three apartments on the top floor gutted by the fire. “I could stand in my kitchen and look at my neighbor’s apartment next door and the next apartment,” Evans said. The Red Cross has temporarily placed her and her partner in a hotel while they search for new housing. In the meantime, Evans said she is still working as a professor and keeping up her performance schedule, given that she has no other options. The support from the arts community, she said, has been “humbling,” especially knowing first-hand the financial challenges of being a working artist.“It made me cry yesterday,” Evans said. “ I love my community, but I know they don’t have a lot … I usually try to help people, now I’m on the other side of it.”