Minnie Evans
(1892–1987)
BornLong Creek, North Carolina
DiedWilmington, North Carolina
BiographyFaces emerge like folkloric beings from vibrant floral patterns, animalistic forms, and symmetrical foliate shapes in Minnie Evans’s drawings. Multiple eyes sometimes gaze out from these highly detailed works, suggesting a powerful, all-seeing presence. Her mixed-media approach might involve pencil, wax crayon, oil paint, and collage on surfaces that ranged from paper and canvas to window shades and book bindings. Some are abstract and others reference more direct religious scenes, but all are enhanced with lush motifs of flowering plants and verdant trees. Evans was born in 1892 in rural Pender County, North Carolina, and moved at a young age to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she attended school until sixth grade and later married and had three sons. In the 1940s, she had various jobs, including as a domestic worker, and then was hired as an admissions gatekeeper at the local Airlie Gardens. Although she had created small graphite and wax-crayon abstract drawings going back to the mid-1930s—as she put it, “Something told me to draw or die”—she was newly driven to create by her immersion in this place of botanical beauty as well as her vivid dreams and spirituality. Azaleas, centuries-old live oaks, and other features of the coastal gardens regularly appear in her depictions of god- and goddess-like beings. She was also inspired by mythology, history, and the family stories of her ancestors, including an enslaved woman from Trinidad. She once stated, “We talk of heaven, we think everything is going to be white. But I believe we’re going to have the beautiful rainbow colors.”
Over time, she made increasingly complex and larger-scale pieces through her spontaneous, intuitive process. She often sold her art at the gardens and started exhibiting her work locally in the early 1960s. In 1975, she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She retired from her job at Airlie Gardens in 1974 but continued to paint and draw. By the time she died, in 1987, she had created thousands of pieces that are luminous with the divine energy she perceived in the natural world. The Minnie Evans Study Center at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington continues to promote research on and preservation of her work.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).