The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans

The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans offers a reexamination of one of the most extraordinary self-taught artists of the twentieth century, just over fifty years after the Whitney presented Minnie Evans ’s groundbreaking first solo museum exhibition in 1975. This touring exhibition, organized by the High Museum of Art, brings together works made between 1935 and 1981 and highlights Evans’s radiant drawings, paintings, and collages inspired by dreams, spiritual revelation, mythology, popular culture, and the natural world.

Through luminous color, dense patterning, and recurring motifs of flowers, birds, angels, and human faces, Evans envisioned a world that blurs the boundaries between the earthly and the divine. Living in Wilmington, North Carolina during the Jim Crow era, Evans created visual images of an imagined “lost world” of harmony and spiritual unity. At once deeply personal and expansive, Evans’s work offers a powerful meditation on faith, imagination, transcendence, and the possibility of harmony amid a vulnerable world.