Long Overlooked, Minnie Evans’s Mystical Landscapes Are Finally Getting the Spotlight

For over 25 years, Minnie Evans (1892–1987) welcomed visitors to Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, earning 16 cents an hour selling tickets at the entrance. Her post at the gatehouse became a studio and gallery for the prolific self-taught African American artist. She would make as many as seven drawings a day featuring her signature blend of florals, animals, and abstraction, hanging them outside to offer for sale to visitors hailing from around the country.

This uniquely public-facing practice eventually became the unlikely gateway to art world fame, culminating in a 1975 retrospective for Evans at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—a career milestone that any artist would be thrilled to reach, let alone one who often used discarded garden maintenance supplies to make her art. And while her name has faded from prominence in the decades since her death, Evans now seems poised on the brink of a major resurgence, with a touring exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a much larger one that opens this November at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will travel to the Whitney next summer.

“Her work is extremely kaleidoscopic and vibrant, using symmetry, exploring natural motifs and often incorporating human faces or eyes into the landscape,” Colton Klein, who guest curated the show for the MFA, told me. “It’s mostly work on paper and crayon, using
scrap paper and affordable materials. She talked about her friends and family and visitors at Airlie Gardens bringing her materials.”

He has centered the exhibition around the garden, including an installation that recreates the tiny floor plan of the gatehouse—around nine by nine-and-a-half feet—complete with the original admission sign, charging $1. Klein also contributed historic postcards of Airlie Gardens from his own personal collection to the display to help illustrate how Wilmington’s verdant landscape is reflected in Evans’s lush drawings.

Who Was Minnie Evans? 

“She was really studying and living and working amongst the flowers, the live oak trees, and other plants that are native to that part of the country and really celebrating and exploring that in her work,” Klein said. “The flora and fauna of North Carolina are very beautiful and inspiring.”

A native of the state born in a rural log cabin, Evans was descended from enslaved Africans forced to come to this country by way of Trinidad. Her only education was through the sixth grade, and she got married at just 16, having three sons.

No one taught Evans to draw, but she had visions from her childhood—visions she was finally moved to begin putting to paper in her 40s. The Whitney owns the first two drawings Evans ever made, sketchy geometric doodles in black pen, created on Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 1930. But she didn’t continue making art until five years later, when she came across those early experiments (which may explain why they are dated 1935).

After a few years of art-marking, Evans one day heard a voice in her head: “Why don’t you draw or die?”

It was a moment that changed Evans’s life. From that point on, art poured out from her, thousands of works, mostly drawings but eventually also collages and oil paintings. Inspired in part by a spiritual reverence for the natural world, Evans—a devout Baptist—also incorporated imagery from her Christian faith, such as angels, as well as symbols from mythology, into dense compositions that were almost mandala-like.

”I love people, to a certain extent,” Evans told in 1969. ”But sometimes I want to get off in the garden to talk with God. I have the blooms, and when the blooms are gone, I love to watch the green. God dressed the world in green.”

Evans’s husband, Julius Caesar Evans, was a coachman and property supervisor for a wealthy Wilmington couple, Pembroke and Sarah Jones. Following her marriage in 1908, Evans became a domestic worker at the Joneses’ hunting estate, known as Pembroke Park, living on the grounds.

The Joneses also owned the adjacent property, which Pembroke christened Airlie after his ancestral home in Scotland, and which Sarah transformed into a lush and sprawling 67-acre garden.

After the Joneses died, Walter Corbett purchased Airlie Gardens in 1948 and opened it to the public, hiring Evans to work the front gate. (He also supported and even collected her art.)

Evans became a fixture of the garden—even featured in the brochure, as seen in a copy from the 1970s on view at the MFA—until her retirement in 1974 at 82 years old. (Today, the garden honors Evans’s long service there with the Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden, featuring a built in tribute to her by local artist Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004.)

A Source of Inspiration—and a Window to the World

“Being enveloped in this garden space, she was surrounded by artistic inspiration,” Klein said. “And then she has this stream of visitors coming from from Wilmington, who are this built-in network of potential potential clients who might come in and buy a work of art. And that’s how her notoriety begins to spread.”

Evans believed in her work, and she was eager to share it with new audiences. The show includes a pair of 1963 letters to a collector who she probably met at Airlie, in which she keeps him apprised of her work: “I am doing a lot of religious paintings… and some more modern arts.”

“When she started working at Airlie, she began to use it as a way to supplement her income. She would hang up the drawings that she was making outside the gatehouse and people would buy them, initially very cheaply for 50 cents to a dollar,” Klein said. “It was still quite personal, but she was starting to think about the ways that she’s marketing her work. And once Nina gets involved, it really takes off. ”

Nina would be the art historian Nina Howell Starr, who learned of Evans in the early 1960s through a friend who had visited Airlie. Starr would become Evans’s publicist and representative, arranging exhibitions such as one at New York’s Church of Epiphany in 1966, and, most notably, at the Whitney.

Klein, currently an art history PhD student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been interested in Evans for well over a decade, since first learning of her at a summer internship at the Cameron during his undergrad studies. Evans later became the subject of Klein’s masters thesis, and, most recently, an article for the , published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

At the MFA, Klein offers a unique interpretation of the works with faces or eyes that seem to peer out of the foliage. He traces them back to a traumatic historical event from Evans’s childhood, the Wilmington massacre, a white supremacist coup that took place in 1898, overthrowing a biracial government and burning Black-owned businesses. (Though Evans was only five years old, she spoke of the event in interviews later in life, noting that she remembered it.)

“There are contemporaneous news accounts of the Black population in Wilmington fleeing the city to the woods. There are stories about people seeing the eyes of people hiding in the trees for upwards of two weeks after that event,” Klein said. “So many of her works have these human faces or eyes kind of blossoming out of flowers
or from behind trees or plants. I want to encourage people to think about the experience that Evans would have had during this very traumatic incident of political violence.”

Will Institutional Interest Lead to a Market Explosion?

Because Evans was so prolific, and because her work was so affordable, it’s hard to say how many surviving examples are out there, and if they might make their way to auction. Some people who purchased works at Airlie used them as postcards, mailing them home to friends as a memento from their time in North Carolina.

“There are stories of people in Wilmington who find her work in their attic,” Klein said. “She definitely has a big collector base there, and that’s spreading now.”

Evans set a new auction record last year, with a $63,000 sale at the “Outsider Art” sale at Christie’s New York in March, according to the Artnet Price Database. But you can still get her work for remarkably low prices.

Last month, two works sold at Bonhams New York for $7,040 and $4,864. This month, a pair of drawings fetched $8,500 and and $5,000 at  Leland Little Auctions in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Five other lots this year have gone for $10,000 or under, with a sixth lot topping out at $35,000 at Leland, for her third-highest result on the block.

But there could soon be a boom in market activity thanks to the institutional attention Evans is currently getting.

The MFA exhibition, organized by Art Bridges, is drawn from the holdings of the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, which has the world’s largest collection of Evans’s work. (It is also home to her archives, at the Minnie Evans Study Center.)

It’s the first museum solo show for the artist since “Minnie Evans: Artist” at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art in 1995, a full 30 years ago. Titled “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans,” it originated at the Gund Museum at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and only features 16 works—a kind of enticing amuse-bouche ahead of “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the High and the Whitney, which will bring together more than 100 of her drawings.

The artist is also the subject of a new documentary, , from North Carolina filmmaker Linda Royal and Lighthouse Films, due out this fall. The MFA holding a screening of the film next month.

“I’m so excited for her legacy and just this resurgence of interest,” Klein said. “It’s definitely a really exciting moment for Minnie.”

Minnie Evans: Draw or Die

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com