The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans

Over half a century, American artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987) created thousands of radiant and kaleidoscopic works of art inspired by vivid dreams and local landscapes in her native Wilmington, North Carolina. These imaginative, intricately detailed drawings and paintings merged her own inner world—her religious beliefs, interest in mythology, and study of history—with the natural environment that surrounded her.

“The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” features 16 multimedia works by Evans—all on loan from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington—and contextualizes them with handwritten letters, postcards, and other ephemera to illuminate the artist’s complex and profoundly spiritual relationship to nature in her hometown.

Growing up in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Evans heard family stories about her ancestors’ experiences of enslavement in the forests of Eastern North Carolina. These coastal woodlands later provided refuge to Black community members during the Wilmington white supremacist coup of 1898, the only successful coup d’état in United States history. During this violent overthrow of the city’s elected mixed-race government, thousands of Black residents fled into the surrounding forests for safety. A reporter at the time described faces peering out from the trees and foliage—an image that became a motif in Evans’s art. In her work, these watchful eyes at once evoke communal memories of the deadly insurrection and the surveillance of enslavement, and also reflect Evans’s faith in nature as divine protection.

Throughout her artistic career, Evans held day jobs in the city’s outlying green spaces—first at Pembroke Park and later at Airlie Gardens, where she worked as a gatekeeper for 26 years. The botanical symmetry and vibrant colors of Airlie’s lush setting enveloped her and inspired her art, which she made in the gatehouse and sold for modest sums.

These intimate yet expansive compositions—often suggestive of Wilmington’s environmental features and interwoven with transcendent visions of disembodied eyes, mythical creatures, and otherworldly angels—invite visitors to consider how personal experiences, shared histories, and spiritual practices shape the ways we see and respond to the natural world around us.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit: Minnie Evans, Untitled (three faces divided by two sunrises over water) (detail), 1968. Oil, ink, and graphite. Collection of the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC. Purchased with funds from the Claude Howell Endowment for the Purchase of North Carolina Art, 2000.7. © Estate of Minnie Jones Evans.