Minnie
Evans, who died in 1987 at age 95, was born in 1890, the only
child of Joseph and Ella Kelley, farmers who lived in rural Pender
County, North Carolina, near Wilmington. Evans' parents moved
to Wilmington during her early childhood, and she attended school
there through the sixth grade. She married Julius Evans of Wilmington
and had three sons. Evans traced her background to a maternal
ancestor who was brought to the United States from Trinidad as
a slave. Minnie
Evans lived among us unnoticed as a servant, a black woman, a
sounder who sold clams and oysters door-to-door and a lady who
minded the gate at Airlie Gardens. But behind that ordinary face
burned fantastic visions. In the mid 1960's , Jo Kallenborn read
a newspaper article about an elderly black woman who took tickets
at the gate at Airlie Gardens and painted fabulous pictures she
said were gifts from God. She frequently gave visitors her paintings
for free, but as people became aware of her talent, they started
paying for her paintings. Determined to meet her, Kallenborn visited
the gatehouse, fell in love with the painter, and wrote a short
article on her for Southern Living magazine. The article generated
a great deal of interest in Mrs. Evans. Letters poured in from
around the nation and she had her first gallery exhibition in
New York City in 1966. Today
Minnie Evans is famous, "a major visionary artist of the
20th century," according to Ann Brennan of the Louise Wells
Cameron Museum in Wilmington. Her work has hung in the country's
finest museums and two of the North Carolina Central University
Art Museum's will be included in the exhibition. The Covenant
and Jesus Christ will join works lent by the North Carolina Museum
of Art, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The North Carolina Museum
of History, The Ackland Art Museum and the Louise Wells Cameron
Museum. "The
paintings and colored drawings of Minnie Evans are surrealistic
and reveal psychic revelations inspired by dreams where angels,
demons, animals and hybrid plants appear before the all-seeing
eye of God. Visitors to this exhibit should prepare for a truly
awe-inspiring sensory experience," said Kenneth G. Rodgers,
Director of the North Carolina Central University Art Museum. The
North Carolina Central University Art Museum, located on Lawson
Street across from the Farrison-Newton Communications Buildings,
is open Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday
from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. For general information,
call (919)530-6211.
The Dream World of Minnie Evans
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 16, 2003, 2:00
pm
More
than thirty works by internationally known recognized visionary
artist Minnie Evans will be on view at the North Carolina Central
University Art Museum in Durham, NC, February 16 through April
18, 2003. The Dream World of Minnie Evans is an overview of the
Wilmington based self-taught artist who said "no one can
teach me because no one knows what to teach me."
The
dream world of Minnie Evans received its earliest visual manifestations
on Good Friday 1925 when she completed two small pen-and-ink drawings
on paper dominated by concentric circles and semicircles against
background of unidentifiable motifs. Evans always placed a good
deal of significance on these early drawings. Evans first paintings
were done entirely in wax crayons and resemble an exercise employing
every color in a gigantic box of Crayolas. The colors included
greens shaded from light to deep, purples from mauve to pink,
rose, and royal, and full ranges of reds, blues, and yellows with
a sparing use of black and white. Evans' complex designs reveal
an unaccountable presence of Caribbean, East Indian, Chinese,
and Western elements in color and subject matter. Her own explanation
of her work was that "this artist that I have put out has
come from the nations I suppose might have been destroyed before
the flood….No one knows anything about them, but God has
given it to me to bring them back into the world."
The
central motif in many of Evans' paintings is a human face surrounded
by curvilinear and spiral plant and animal forms and eyes merging
with foliate patterns. Minnie Evans has scant explanation for
any of these images or symbols. In fact she said "My work
is just as strange to me as they are to anyone else." She
equated eyes with the omniscience of God and the concept of the
eye as the window of the soul. The figures in her designs are
sometimes portraits of ancient wise men and women who peopled
her visions, ancestral visitors from some spiritual order, or
angels, demons, and chimerical creatures.