iWhitney Museum of American ArtMeatpacking District
The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans
A touring retrospective of self-taught artist Minnie Evans's work from 1935-1981: vibrant drawings, paintings and collages blending spiritual imagery with natural motifs, made in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era.
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In late May 1944, a fortune teller in Wilmington looked at Minnie Evans's drawings and told her the Allied invasion of Europe would not happen until she painted it. She painted Invasion Picture, a mound of skulls under a Mosquito aircraft, and D-Day came several days later. It hangs on the eighth floor.
You start with her first two pen drawings, from 1935, titled My Very First and My Second, and the show runs in order to the dense, mandala-like pictures she made from the 1960s on, more than 100 works in all. During wartime rationing she drew on found Coast Guard stationery and a window shade. She titled one 1963 drawing Modern Art, and in 1975 the Whitney put it on the cover of her exhibition brochure.
Labels are in English and Spanish, with Bloomberg Connects audio and verbal descriptions for several works. Admission is $30, free for visitors 25 and under, on Friday evenings from 5 to 10pm and on second Sundays.
Look for
Invasion Picture (1944)
A mound of skulls and a Mosquito combat aircraft over a watery landscape like Wilmington's coast, painted after a vision in which she heard God tell her to "draw or die".
Airlie Oak (1954)
The Airlie Gardens oak, a tree dating to at least 1545, built up in layers of dried paint she scraped from old cans and thinned with turpentine, on a wooden crate lid.
The turnaround pictures
Crayon drawings symmetrical on both axes, made to hang and be viewed from any orientation, with feathered forms, pincher forms and eye pendants.
Modern Art (1963)
White angels stand guard over an altar-like centre of long pine trees, winged beasts, mandalas and cryptic writing, framed by decorative curves.
Minnie Evans Art 1981
A 57-page scrapbook, one of her last works, with her self-portrait on the cover and, inside, drawings, photographs, letters and the 1969 Newsweek article that called her a "beautiful dreamer".
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Going Solo
- Nerding Out
With kids
Free for visitors 25 and under. Some labels discuss the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and her wartime dreams of bombs.
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Image credits
8
- The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans© The Estate of Minnie Evans. Photograph by Christopher Burke
- Yoshitomo NaraCourtesy of David Zwirner
- Jem Perucchini: SospiroCourtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London
- Whitney Museum of American ArtBeyond My Ken, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- David ZwirnerCourtesy David Zwirner
- Hauser & WirthJim.henderson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Dia ChelseaFound5dollar, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Pace GalleryPace Gallery