Minnie Evans (American, 1892–1987)

Minnie Evans was born in 1892 in Long Creek, North Carolina. Born into poverty, Evans was brought as an infant to Wilmington, North Carolina, to live with her grandmother, Mary Croom Jones. Minnie left school after the fifth grade to work selling seafood door-to-door and in 1908 she married Julius Evans. Together, they raised three sons. Eventually, she got a job as a domestic worker at Pembroke Park, a private estate. The property reopened as the Airlie Garden arboretum in 1948; Evans became the gatekeeper. During her time there, Evans completed most of her drawings. While her first drawings were made in pen and ink, she later used crayon and colored pencils and then oil paints.

Inspired by her time at the gardens, and her religious visions, Evans’s drawings are intricate, with foliate and floral patterns intersecting depictions of myth and the Bible. She explores her ancestors’ histories under slavery, and, in tandem with her revelations, the eyes of an omnipresent God recur as a motif throughout her vast body of work. Evans created around one thousand works during her lifetime before passing away in 1987 in Wilmington.