Bio

Minnie Evans (1892-1987) Minnie Eva Evans was a self-taught Black artist, who was born to rural farmers in North Carolina in 1892. As an adult, she worked as a gatekeeper at a public garden, which may explain the striking floral motifs in many of her works. Evans claimed that she mostly found inspiration from her dreams, and God played a central role in many of her works with eyes representing the window to the soul. In her own words, “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 back into the world.” Her artworks were done created most often with wax crayons and pencil, and she seemed to employ every color of the rainbow (or of the box of crayons). Evans’s drawings unconsciously tap into surrealism and were made with self-conscious self-guessing or self-doubt, as the works were made for just herself. “Something told me to draw or die,” Evans stated. “It was shown to me what I should do.”

CV

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2023

Death of an Outsider, SHRINE, Los Angeles, CA

2018

Annex, SHRINE, New York, NY