The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans at the Whitney

The Whitney's eighth floor is hosting The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, a retrospective of the self-taught North Carolina artist (1892–1987) that runs through January 10, 2027. The museum gave Evans a solo show in 1975, and this presentation returns to her work more than fifty years later.

Evans was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. She made her first drawing in 1935, after the death of her beloved grandmother, and over the following decades produced hundreds of pencil and crayon drawings, oil paintings and collages guided by vivid dreams and visions. Her sources ran from Afro-Caribbean heritage, mythology and religion to popular culture, decorative arts and the plants and gardens around her home. The compositions are dense and symmetrical, filled with angels, mythical creatures, watchful faces and intricate patterns. They suggest harmony and transcendence, though a faint unease runs underneath.

The title comes from Evans herself, who described a protected spiritual realm that existed before the biblical flood as the "lost world." The galleries group works in tight clusters on pale walls, with one section on pale blue where small pieces hang in a grid. Early works from the 1940s include the Turnaround Pictures and insect and butterfly forms. From the following decades come Resurrection (1960), pieces drawn from Airlie Gardens and Wrightsville Beach, collages of faces and angels, and Untitled (Face with Crown and Angels) from 1968, an oil, ink, gold paint and pencil work on paper.

Evans's reputation grew in the 1960s. After small gallery shows in Wilmington and New York, she was profiled in Newsweek in 1969, and museum group exhibitions followed before her 1975 Whitney exhibition. The retrospective presents the merging of the everyday and the divine that runs through her work.

The show was organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and curated by Katherine Jentleson. At the Whitney it is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, with Caroline Webb, Curatorial Assistant. Audio guides accompany the exhibition, and a members' evening, Pop Party, is scheduled for October 28.