Minnie Evans

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Minnie Evans (December 12, 1892 – December 16, 1987) was an African-American artist from North Carolina. She is known as a southern folk artist, outsider artist, visionary, and surrealist. Evans began drawing in the 1930s after visions and dreams, and she kept making art for decades.

Early life
She was born Minnie Eva Jones in Long Creek, North Carolina, to Ella Jones. Her father left after she was born. When she was two months old, she moved with her mother to Wilmington to live with her grandmother. Schooling ended when she was 13. She married Julius Caesar Evans at 16 and had three sons. Her husband often told her to stop dreaming and focus on home life, and he doubted her art.

Work and life at Airlie Gardens
In 1916 she worked as a domestic helper for a wealthy family on their estate. Later, she lived and worked at Airlie Estate. From 1948 she served as the gatekeeper of Airlie Gardens, a job she held until 1974. The gardens inspired many of her paintings. Evans began selling her art at the gates of the gardens, giving pieces away to visitors and gradually gaining attention in the region.

Artistic development
Evans started drawing seriously again in 1940, using pencil, ink, wax crayons, and later oils and mixed media. Her imagery often mixes biblical themes with scenes from nature, drawn from dreams and her surroundings at Airlie Gardens. Her pictures frequently feature a central human face surrounded by plants and animals, with eyes she believed reflected God’s knowing presence.

Rising fame
In 1961 Evans had her first formal exhibition at the Little Artists Gallery in Wilmington (now St. Johns Museum). Nina Howell Starr, a photographer and art historian, began promoting Evans in 1962 and helped move her work to New York and major museums. Evans had several important exhibitions, including a New York show in 1966, another in 1969, and a major Whitney Museum exhibition in 1975. She continued to exhibit her work into the 1980s.

Legacy and death
Minnie Evans died in Wilmington in 1987 at the age of 95. She left more than 400 artworks to the St. Johns Museum of Art (now the Cameron Art Museum) in Wilmington. The Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel at Airlie Gardens, created in her memory by artist Virginia Wright-Frierson, honors her legacy. The chapel features bottles, stained glass, and stepping-stone gardens inspired by her work. Minnie Evans Day was proclaimed in Greenville, North Carolina, in 1994.

Her work is considered some of the most important visionary folk art of the 20th century and is held by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the High Museum of Art. A 1983 documentary, The Angel that Stands By Me, tells her story. In 2025, major exhibitions in Boston (The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans) and Atlanta (The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans) celebrated her work, and a documentary titled Minnie Evans: Draw or Die was released.