Born to a family of farmers near Wilmington, North Carolina, Minnie Evans (1892-1987) never intentionally set out to become an artist. She observed the rural landscapes of her early childhood home in Pender County, then moved to Wilmington, where she attended school until the sixth grade. She married, had three children, and was devoted to her religious beliefs. Steered by vivid dreams and visions, she made her first drawing on Good Friday in 1935, when she was in her early 40s.
“I never plan a drawing. They just happen,” Evans said in 1969, when her work had begun to gain recognition. “In a dream, it was shown to me what I have to do, of paintings. The whole entire horizon all the way across the whole earth was out together like this with pictures. All over my yard, up all the sides of trees and everywhere were pictures.”
The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, a survey of the self-taught artist’s work, is currently on view at the High Museum of Art. The show takes its title from the way Evans herself once described her approach. Like much American folk art, what she referred to as “the lost world” was drawn from visions of religious imagery. In Evans’ case, places destroyed by the Great Flood, as described in the Book of Genesis, provided endless inspiration.
Evans had long been employed as a domestic worker, but at the age of 56, she took a job as an admissions taker at the gate of Airlie Gardens, a botanical garden in Wilmington. The verdant landscape’s elegant trees and flowers provided endless inspiration for her drawings, which often emphasize foliage, petals, and faces organized in a loose symmetry. She uses a range of materials like ink, crayon, pencil, paint, and pen, typically emphasizing vibrant color and pattern-like repeated motifs.
The artist often hung her drawings for sale on the Airlie Gardens gate, and over time, word spread about her unique work, earning a solo exhibition at a church in New York titled The Lost World of Minnie Evans. “The High’s presentation reprises that 1966 title, honoring Evans’s interest in biblical and ancient civilizations while foregrounding the spiritual and historical circumstances of her extraordinary life,” the museum says. Showing more than 100 pieces, the exhibition showcases “the extrasensory experiences of her visions to the double-edged realities of her life in the Jim Crow South.”
Evans was among the first Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Lost World marks the first major presentation of her work in about three decades. The exhibition continues through April 19 in Atlanta.
