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View Images USA Appalachia

Wilmington, NC Minnie Evans 1892-1987 Drawings (pencil, pen, marker, etc.)

Information: Considered one of "50 Classic Outsiders", Raw Vision Sourcebook, 2002"" My whole life has been nothing but dreams," Minnie Evans told an interviewer a few years before her death. Elaborately realistic dreams, waking visions and disembodied voices that no one else could hear were a part of her everyday life. Of the many such experiences she had, probably the most significant in its enduring impact came on Good Friday, 1935. Feeling oddly disoriented that afternoon, she suddenly heard a voice presenting her with the unsettling proposition, "Why don’t you draw or die?" Her response was to draw rough, geometric designs that were abstract and densely patterned. They were the beginning of a new life for Evans. She soon realized that drawing provided a means by which she could give concrete form to her dreams, and by the early 1940s she was making it a regular practice. Evans made her drawings in relative obscurity for 20 years occasionally selling them to visitors at Airlie gardens, where she worked as gatehouse-keeper during much of her later life. Then, in the 1960s, her work came to the attention of the New York art world. Evans’ richly colored, symmetrically centered drawings and paintings are lush, kaleidoscopic mandalas from whose intricate geometries emerge a variety of recurring images. Prominent among them are flowers, ritual masks, cornucopias, angels, regal-looking individuals, disembodied eyes, radiant trees, butterflies, tropical birds, unicorns and other real or mythological creatures. These images and their interplay within her individual works suggest that Evans’ main concern was in revealing an alternate reality akin to the biblical promised land and the visions of an eternal paradise also found in other religious traditions. Her insistence that these idyllic, otherworldly landscapes were places she had actually seen and visited indicates that she was not just a highly imaginative artist but a genuine mystic, tuned in to a dimension of reality that is invisible to most of us. Tom Patterson Winston-Salem Journal Creative Heart Gallery

	Reference / Links:
	Luise Ross Gallery: "Minnie Evans" Anton Haardt Gallery (under Artists): "Minnie Evans" Slotin Folk Art Creative Heart Gallery
	(Detour Art is not responsible for the content of external web sites.)

Bibliography: Museums, etc. American Folk Art Museum, NY Anthony Petullo collection, Milwaukee, WI Art Institute of Chicago, IL Collection de 'lArt Brut, Lausanne High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA North Carolina of Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC Whitney Museum of American Art, Washington DC References "Folk Art" Vol. 19, No 4, 1994-5. "Heavenly Visions, the Art of Minnie Evans", exhibit catalog, 1986. "Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists" by Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, New York, 1990. "Minnie Evans, Artist", exhibit catalog, 1993. "Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector's Guide" Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, 1996. "Raw Vision" No 11, 1995 "50 Classic Outsiders", Raw Vision Sourcebook, 2002" "20th Century American Folk, Self Taught, and Outsider Art" by Betty-Carol Sellen, Cynthia J. Johnson, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, 1993. "Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art—A guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources" by Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johnson, 2000. "Let it Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection" by Lynne E. Spriggs, Joanne Cubbs, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Susan Mitchell Crawley, Michael E. Shapiro and Peter Harholdt, organized by the High Museum of Art, 2001. "American Self-Taught Art: An Illustrated Analysis of 20th Century Artists and Trends with 1,319 Capsule Biographies" by Florence Laffal and Julius Laffal, 2003. "Souls Grown Deep: African American vernacular Art of the South", Vol 1, Arnett, et al, 1995. Slotin Folk Art Auction Catalog, Masterpiece Sale, November 4, 2006

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