Janine Evers

Evers was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2017, and her health declined after a fall in September 2026. She spent her last nine days at the Lily House hospice in Wellfleet, attended by loved ones, and died there on 26 October 2026, aged 64, from complications of Parkinson's disease following the fall. A memorial was held at the Lily House on what would have been her 65th birthday. She was survived by her sister, Carol Nagel, and her brother, Bill Evers, and was predeceased by her parents. Donations in her memory were invited to the Lily House.

Janine Evers was born on 4 November 1961 in Huntington, New York, and grew up in Nanuet, New York, one of three children. Her mother, Marylin Boughton Evers, was an artist and poet; her father, James Evers, was a middle school teacher who co-founded the Rockland Project School, part of the progressive open education movement of the late 1960s. She attended that school and then the Center for Education in Englewood, New Jersey, which a friend said nurtured her freethinking, artistic spirit. As a teenager she loved Matisse and took bus trips into the city for classes at the Art Students League of New York. She later studied at Bard College and the School of Visual Arts.

In New York City she shared an apartment with her high school friend, the artist Wendy Small, and worked for a couple of years at the Pearl Paint art supply store. She lived for periods in Florida and Connecticut, supporting her painting with jobs that included waiting tables, temp work and teaching.

In 2010, after six years in New York, she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, whose art scene she admired, particularly the work of Denny Camino. She kept a studio at the Provincetown Commons Annex and was represented by 411 Gallery from its opening in 2010 by its owner, Liz Carney, who said of her work: "She had brilliant use of composition, color, line, all the abstract qualities that make a strong painting." Many of the paintings she made after her mother's death took their titles from her mother's poetry, which she consulted only once a work was finished, to avoid illustration. Her last show was a two woman exhibition with the painter Julie Smith in summer 2026. She also worked in town as a dogsitter and at the Shui Spa, the Blue Gallery and Womencrafts. A short film about her work was made for Provincetown Community TV in 2019.

Evers came out as a lesbian in the late 1970s and 1980s and wrote of how lesbian feminist bookstores had been essential gathering places for her generation; walking into Womencrafts in Provincetown in 2010, she said, felt like coming home. In 2020 she lent the heavy black rotary telephone from her childhood home to "Phone on the Wind", an installation where people could speak to lost loved ones, saying she already used it to talk to her late mother.

Friends and fellow artists remembered her as a beloved figure in Provincetown's art community. Liz Carney said every artist at 411 Gallery felt seen and understood talking with her, and admired her sensitivity, her critique and her curiosity about other artists.