The Art of Getting Lost in Minnie Evans
A man buys a drawing. A terrible friction materializes between the two of them, the man and the drawing, the latter of which might have been a vision on paper of existence on another plane—a flat botanical realm, rainbow-bright, governed by floating, expressionless heads. The symmetry, the sense of exact echoing across a central median, an inescapable reversibility. Harmony, as a force of relation, dominates; here is the telegraphing of a closed world accessible seemingly only to one. He can’t get in. Does he want to? He returns the piece, an extraordinary gesture of sensitivity and respect that I do not think would have been an affront to Minnie Evans, the artist, as she herself had felt knocked, again and again, off axis by the energy of her yield.
The extent of her yield, done over fifty years—we can’t count it. Her fearsome paradisical pieces have been flung like seed across the continents in an informal way. A share, nearly one hundred paintings and drawings—organized with passion and concern, initially, by the curator Katherine Jentleson, in Atlanta, and more recently by Barbara Haskell, in New York—lives on the eighth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art until January of next year.
Here I am, at the exhibit, “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans,” trying not to be the man who could not handle being in space. I am surrounded by brown pulp that shows the evidence of her hand, an instrument at turns weighty, mathematical, and fleet. And, on this paper, mandalas, like sliced-open eggs, carry the expressionless heads, who seem to have no relation to anything like humanity, though they have our features, they have our eyelashed eyes—multiples of them—which, like the slow explosions of flora, the horned mammals, the scaled serpents, float ungrounded in her overloaded compositions. The “ground” in Evans’s drawings, which she, in a compulsive period of production, made with pencil and crayon, is often a sparse grove of trees, etched toward the bottom third of the paper, just barely suggesting the physical world from which her almost psychedelic beings jut forward, as if they are attached to a compressed spring, a jack-in-the-box of consciousness. Close your eyes intermittently. You will have to; the optic nerve needs to recover. And in the darkness you will remember her pet colors are pinks, greens, and oranges—secondaries, the colors of volubility, that always suggest the clash and the mix of the primaries that make them.
The show at the Whitney is an echo of the past. The photographer Nina Howell Starr guest-curated an exhibition, in 1975, of Evans’s work at the museum, making her the third Black woman to have a solo show at the institution. Controversy came—from members of the cosmopolitan Black art scene, who had been protesting modern art museums like the Whitney for not exhibiting more work by Black artists. It seemed to them like an insult to bring Evans to the level of an innovative star like Alma Thomas, the first Black woman to get a Whitney solo show. How had Evans, an untrained artist, who may not have known, all these years she had been drawing, that she even was an artist, become a pawn in New York? Evans was ranked as “primitive,” a double-edged epithet, coming from where it did. Her fantastical Biblical scenes, of a graphic, storybook sensibility, sometimes showed angels, and Christ himself, as chalky white, and this rang in some Black critical circles as a sign of backwater unsophistication. (Curators have been mining the underappreciated artists of Afro-Surrealism for the past couple of years, but I wish that today’s show had been staged earlier, in the twenty-tens, when debates about representation in painting were at a higher pitch.) But Evans herself had no truck with polemics. It wasn’t useful for the expression of her pleasure and her pain. She was the highest level of abstractionist: she distilled humanity to its most perfect point, before race and before war.
A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl named Ella gave birth, in 1892, to a daughter named Minnie. The child was raised primarily by her grandmother Mary Croom Jones. They lived in the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early mornings, they went to the water to root for oysters, working as sounders. Julius Evans, the man who gave her the surname we know, married Minnie when she was sixteen. She lied about her age, because she could not wait longer to marry him. They had children, boys. She worked as a domestic servant at the Pembroke Estate, a lavish manse in Wilmington, and her sons did, too—as boys.
In childhood, in adulthood, in her old age, Evans was besotted by dreams, turbulent, awesome, pictorial dreams. Utopia is the state that cannot be reached. She dreamed, she said, of the lost world, the multitude of nations lost to the hemorrhage of the Great Flood. Mary Croom Jones died in the mid-thirties. The death of her mother figure put Evans in a state. One day, a voice told her to draw these visions or die, more or less. And so she drew. The first work, made in 1935, which she named, portentously, “My Very First,” was an elliptical pen-and-ink drawing of a solar eye, flanked by dashed-off stick figurines, drawn on the back of a grocery list. Julius could not always bear the weight of her dreaming and her drawing. Her dreaming exhausted her as a mother; it had exhausted her as a child, she recalled, causing her to fall asleep at school. She sometimes missed Sunday service at the neighborhood A.M.E. church. Was she not, well, afflicted in some way? A pastor scolded Julius, telling him to let her be.
In her late fifties, Evans was set up with a job as gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens, in Wilmington. Evidently, the azaleas were her muse, although she had no use for naturalism. The nature of the post made Evans a public figure. What did Jamaica Kincaid write of gardens? That they were havens of pleasure and of conquest. (The plantation is the full perversion of the garden.) Evans’s drawings, which she would sell at the grounds, attained a legend that travelled beyond North Carolina.
Is it right to say that the meeting of Starr, a photographer from up North, and Evans, was fortuitous, as Evans had that aura of ordainment wrapped around her? I don’t think so. By the early sixties, the romance of the untaught or naïve artist was really catching. The “discovery” of Evans by Starr pulled, incrementally, Evans through the legitimatizing gauntlet. Exhibitions were organized at churches in New York City. Scholars hazarded theories as to how an unschooled middle-aged Black woman from the South could brush with genius. The condescension was of its time, a provincialism of the art world, ironically. Evans was as worldly as they come. Who knows more of the injustice of the world than the girl who saw her town seized by a white-supremacist coup, the Wilmington massacre, in 1898? One critic deemed Evans an “innocent surrealist.” It is true that André Breton did not take the train through Wilmington. But the Surrealists were heretical, dreamy, spiritual orphans of the wars, and war touched Evans down in Wilmington, where warships were built. Who knows more of the world than the Black mother of sons sent to war, World War II? In a story that sounds like Apocrypha, Evans met a psychic called Madame Toola, who urged her to paint what would become “Invasion Picture,” her memento-mori composition of the Allied forces landing in Normandy.
As much as you can conceive it, Starr, as custodian, archivist, and chief interlocutor—as the Atlanta curator Katherine Jentleson writes in a wonderful essay for a monograph attached to the show—seemed to have Evans’s back. Evans herself asked Starr to put her work through the grind of interpretation. Exhibitions of Evans’s work were put up in galleries and churches—the artist taking on the lesser, commercial labor of drawing an audience. But there were limits to how much Starr could understand about Evans, and how much Evans wanted to share with Starr. In a recent documentary, “Minnie Evans: Draw or Die,” and in the aforementioned monograph, scholars such as Jentleson, Kim Conaty, and María Elena Ortiz think through Evans and the notion of connection, across history, nation, culture, politics, because she is so physically remote from, say, the Buddhist iconography, or the Caribbean-Surrealist poetics, that seems to vibrate so dramatically in her work. It is useful to know, for example, that a matriarchal ancestor called Monie, who had been enslaved in Trinidad, was an important part of the Jones family lore. Is this received memory the source of the blazing Pointillism, which makes us think of bejewelled carnival masks? It is important to know that Evans became, at one point, obsessed with the Fu Manchu films, which explain the off-putting Chinese faces that sometimes people her compositions. But all the biographical detail and the scholarly theorizing cannot complete the math. It is a tricky situation, because she is a spiritualist, like Hilma af Klint, and, simultaneously, an automatist. We cannot afford to disenfranchise the creator of her powers, to let the stereotype of the egoless outsider artist diminish her vision. There comes a moment, looking at Evans’s dense worlds, when the eye stops decoding and the mind begins to surrender. She is, to a degree, unknowable, in a closeted relationship to that which compels her. You feel that your act of looking is on some level a vulgarity. ♦