The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans features mixed media artworks and ephemera from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina by Minnie Evans. Born in 1892, Evans pursued art later in life following a vision in which she was told to “draw or die.” Deeply religious, she believed that God occupied the flora and fauna that surrounded her and often imagined a “lost world” following the events of the Great Flood from the Book of Genesis. While working as a gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, she took inspiration from the botanical surroundings, often decorating the gates around the gardens with her artwork for visitors to purchase. Through her depictions, she combined the world around her with her dreams and visions, revealing an alternate reality where humans mingled amongst spirits, plants and animals, and the omnipresent eye of God. 

 

Evans died in 1987 at the age of 95 years old. Born in the American South shortly after the Reconstruction Era, Evans would have seen intense social change throughout her life, including the advent and dissolution of Jim Crow laws. In 1898, just weeks before Evans’ sixth birthday, a mob of several thousand white men descended on the artist’s hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina to overthrow the elected municipal government. To escape attacks, Black residents fled into outlying forests and swamps. The Wilmington insurrection of 1898 replaced the mixed-race government of the city with a white supremacist regime and remains the only successful coup d'état in United States history. Though she was young at the time, Evans stated that she remembered the event. Eye-witness reports recalled faces peering out from the surrounding flora, a motif that occurs frequently in the artist’s works. 

 

Though she only attended school until the age of 13, Evans loved history and traced her background to a maternal ancestor who was brought as a slave to the United States from Trinidad. She was deeply interested in the world beyond her hometown, believing that her visions were ways in which the nations destroyed in the Great Flood may be brought back. Her compositions carry influences from Eastern and Western visual culture, including the symmetry of mandalas and the decorative costumes of Caribbean Carnival celebrations.

 

Unknowingly drawing from the Surrealist practice of dream interpretation and automatic drawing, Evans’ compositions reveal an unconscious storytelling of the artist’s own life – from the trauma of witnessing political violence to the discovery of Caribbean roots. Her work shows a devotion to a higher power, present among all living things, and encourages us to consider the ways in which our own histories affect the ways in which we move through our lives.