Minnie Evans

All Artists: 

Portrait

About the artist

1892–1987, lived and worked in Wilmington, North Carolina

Born Minnie Eva Jones in Long Creek, North Carolina, in 1892, to a family with Trinidadian ancestry, this remarkable artist made her first drawing on Good Friday, 1935, an appropriate inaugural date for a painter so attuned to the inspiration of the Spirit. As a young woman in eastern and coastal North Carolina, Evans—she married Julius Caesar Evans at age sixteen—worked as a seamstress, domestic servant, and a “sounder” (a shellfish hawker). From 1948 to 1974 she served as gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens near Wilmington, where the lush landscape likely inspired her art practice, to which she had fully dedicated herself since about 1940. During this fruitful period of her career, Evans sold her small drawings and paintings to visitors to the Gardens. Initially using ink, graphite, and wax crayon, she eventually began to work in oil paint, occasionally collaging her characteristically small-format pieces into larger compositions. She first exhibited in 1961 at Wilmington’s Little Tree Gallery; a year later, her work came to the attention of photographer Nina Howell Starr, who helped Evans score shows in New York, leading to a 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Evans continued working into her twilight years, constantly refining her spiritual dream imagery and finding her work the object of international praise and eager collection.

     The “visionary” label assigned to Minnie Evans and the exotic, fantastic subject matter central her work may be misleading, a critical oversimplification of her own sophisticated understanding of her art as related to African American Christian worship as well as to dreaming. She commonly experienced vivid and powerful dreams and visions throughout her long life—as do many self-described “saints” of the African American Holiness-Pentecostal traditions––but Evans considered her paintings only dutifully abstracted transcriptions: “I can’t paint what I dream, because I paint a memorandum of my dreams. . . I have so many dreams about angels. I paint imitations of angels just as I’ve imagined them. I do not believe that there is an artist born who can paint an angel, because they come from the throne of God. We can get the imitation, but we can’t paint the real angel.”* So her stunning, hallucinatory “imitations” seemingly function as praise objects or prayers, sometimes accompanied by obscure, indecipherable scripts or spirit writing. Populated by a menagerie of mythical flora and fauna, rendered in formally exquisite symmetry and kaleidoscopic counterpoise, her mystical works were, for her, directly related to ancient, antediluvian cultures of the Bible. Some critics have noticed kinships to West African religious art, but Evans’s intensely personal use of brilliant, super-saturated color, her dense thickets of ornamentation, and her dreamt iconography likewise resemble the more contemporary Euro-American art experiments of certain Symbolists and Surrealists.

 

—Brendan Greaves

 

*Rogers, Barbara, “Draw or Die,” Wilmington Star News, January 19, 1969, B–1.33.

Bibliography

Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
 
Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways through the Black Atlantic South. New York: Intar Latin American Gallery, 1988.
 
Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson. A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
 
Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Dallas Museum of Art, 1989.
 
Black History and Artistry: Work by Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors from the Blanchard-Hill Collection. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1993.
 
Blasdel, Gregg N. Symbols and Images: Contemporary Primitive Artists. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1970.
 
Coker, Gylbert. “Elephant Around the Moon: The Art of Minnie Evans,” Raw Vision 11 (Spring 1995): 28–35.
 
Dewhurst, C. Kurt, Betty MacDowell, and Marsha Mac Dowell. Religious Folk Art in America; Reflections of Faith. New York: E.P. Dutton/Museum of American Folk Art, 1983.
 
Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence. Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum, 1992.
 
Forever Free: Art by African-American Women 1862–1980. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 1981.
 
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art. San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Museum of Art, 1994
 
Heavenly Visions: The Art of Minnie Evans. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1986.
 
Hemphill, Herbert W., Jr., and Julia Weissman. Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
 
Johnson, Jay, and William Ketchum, Jr. American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1983.
 
Keeping The Faith: An Exhibition of Religious Folk Art. St. Louis, MO: Center of Contemporary Art, 1999.
 
Koota, Sharon D. “Cosmograms and Cryptic Writings: ‘Africanisms,’” The Clarion (Summer 1991): 48–52.
 
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
 
Lyons, Mary E. Painting Dreams: Minnie Evans, Visionary Artist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.
 
Manley, Roger. Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1989.
 
Metcalf, Eugene. “Black Art, Folk Art, and Social Control,” Winterthur Portfolio vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 271–289.
 
Minnie Evans. New York: Whitney Museum, 1975.
 
Minnie Evans: Artist. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University/Wellington, B. Gray Gallery, 1993.
 
Muffled Voices: Folk Artists in Contemporary America. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1986.
 
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
 
Perry, Regenia A. What It Is: Black American Folk Art from the Collection of Regenia Perry. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1982.
 
Personal Intensity: Artists in Spite of the Mainstream. Milwaukee: Art Museum, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1991.
 
Powell, Richard J. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
 
Rhodes, Colin. Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
 
Rodman, Selden. Artists in Tune with their World: Masters of Popular Art in the Americas and their Relation to the Folk Tradition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
 
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
 
Southern Works on Paper, 1900–1950. Atlanta: Southern Arts Federation, 1981.
 
Starr, Nina Howell. “The Lost World of Minnie Evans,” The Bennington Review 3 (Summer 1969): 41–43.
 
Tree of Life: The Inaugural Exhibition of the American Visionary Art Museum. Baltimore: American Visionary Art Museum, 1996.
 
Wilson, Charles R., and William Ferris. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
 
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.
 
Zolberg, Vera L. and Joni Maya Cherbo, eds. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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