EveNSteve: Monumental and Historical Works
The collaborative art of EveNSteve begins with place. Their monumental works explore the visual and emotional essence of sites through large-scale in-camera collages—some stretching the full length of a roll of film, others unfolding across multiple panoramic panels. These images, printed on rare and handmade papers from around the world, are layered with handwritten text, fusing past and present, fact and fiction, silence and voice.
Research is integral to the process. Historical letters, newspaper clippings, diaries, and speeches surface within the works—intertwined with imagined micro-histories and poetic observations. Like discovering the soundtrack to a silent film, the handwritten words transform the experience of the photographs, immersing the viewer in a new kind of seeing.
You Will Do Better in Toledo
Toledo, Ohio, has long been a city of movement and convergence: Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples; French traders; German, Irish, Polish, Black, Arab, Dutch, and Latino Americans—all have shaped its landscape. Communities rise and recede like tides, echoing the greater American story of migration, settlement, and reinvention.
But Toledo is also emblematic of post-industrial decline. Vacant lots and boarded windows speak to decades of deindustrialization and loss. Still, the city endures.
In this work, Stephen Schaub’s vertical in-camera panoramas reshape Toledo's skyline into something both monumental and intimate. Author Eve O. Schaub's handwritten text traces the hidden histories and hopes of its people, threading through alleyways and rooftops to resurrect stories long buried beneath the asphalt.
Listen to Eve read the text from this monumental artwork:
You Will Do Better In Toledo Audio
A Wonderful Plague
Created in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, A Wonderful Plague bridges multiple pandemics across centuries. On March 17, 2020, Stephen Schaub traveled from Vermont to a rumored Smallpox cemetery in Massachusetts; Eve O. Schaub researched the historical waves of illness that had swept the region—from early European-borne plagues to the AIDS crisis and the global coronavirus outbreak.
The resulting six panels are set in Provincetown, Massachusetts—a community profoundly shaped by disease and resilience. Layered onto black-and-white landscapes are handwritten fragments: statistics, myths, quotes, and meditations on power, loss, and survival.
The title, drawn from a 1620 colonial document, refers to the notion that God had "cleared the land" of Indigenous people by plague—laying bare the intertwined legacies of violence and faith. Who controls the story of disease? And how do we navigate meaning in the face of suffering?
The Home of My Choice
Alexander Twilight, educator, minister, and legislator, remains a complex and contested figure in Vermont history. Often described as the first African American college graduate in the United States, Twilight’s legacy has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and sometimes rewritten—his racial identity framed through the lenses of different eras and agendas.
In this series, EveNSteve probe not only Twilight’s achievements but the deeper implications of how history chooses to remember. What does it mean to celebrate a man who neither embraced nor rejected the racial identity later imposed on him? What does that say about us—as Vermonters, as Americans?
The imagery invites the viewer into quiet architectural and natural spaces connected to Twilight’s life. Over these, Eve's words pose urgent questions about race, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about progress.
Declared Alexander Twilight Day in Vermont, September 23rd is a recognition of a man whose story resists simplification—and whose life, in many ways, mirrors the elusive truth of American history itself.
