Minnie Evans
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Minnie Evans (1890-1987) was an African-American folk artist known for her colorful drawings executed in colored pencil.
[edit] Life
Evans was born in 1892, the only child of Joseph and Ella Kelley, farmers from Pender County, North Carolina. The family moved to Wilmington early in her childhood; there she attended school through the sixth grade. There, too, she met and married Julius Evans, with whom she had three sons.
The paintings and drawings of Minnie Evans depict scenes from the artist's private dream world. But even to the artist herself, this dream world was not entirely comprehensible.
Evans began drawing on Good Friday, 1935. She said "I had a dream, its voice spoke to me: ‘Why don't you draw or die?' ‘Is that it?,' I said, ‘My, My.'" That morning she completed a pair of small pen-and-ink drawings on paper; these works, dominated by a pattern of concentric circles and semi-circles upon a background of lines, became greatly significant to her in her later life. Most of her earliest pieces were executed in wax crayons; she later turned to colored pencil. She never viewed her work as particularly artistic, and did not make it her career, choosing instead to spend much of her life as the gatekeeper of Airlie Gardens in Wilmington.
Evans was the subject of the documentary The Angel that Stands By Me: Minnie Evans' Art in 1983; she died in Wilmington in 1987.
[edit] Work
Evans' drawings were inspired by her dreams, and were filled with many different colors, possibly inspired by her work at Airlie Gardens. Her designs are complex, with elements recalling the art of China and the Caribbean combined with more Western themes. The central motif in many pieces is a human face surrounded by plant and animal forms. The eyes, which Evans equated with God's omniscience, are central to each figure. In addition, God is sometimes depicted with wings and a multicolored collar and halo, and He is shown surrounded by all manner of creatures.
Of her drawings, Evans once said that "this art 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[1]."
