Acclaimed American artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987) once described her drawings, filled with human, botanical, and animal forms, as coming from “the lost world,” referring to “the nations destroyed before the Flood.” After her grandmother died in 1934 and the visions she had been experiencing since childhood became stronger, Evans went on to produce a large and celebrated body of work and in 1975 became one of the first Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Though she was lauded in her lifetime, she has not been the subject of a major exhibition since the 1990s.
Inspired by its growing collection of her work, the High is organizing this nationally touring retrospective that brings together more than one hundred of Evans’s fantastical drawings and puts them in the larger context of her extraordinary life. Presented chronologically beginning with Evans’s spare, line-driven compositions of the 1930s through to her colorful, complex compositions and lush, utopian mandalas of the 1960s, the exhibition, and its catalogue, will explore how Evans fits into expanded canons of Surrealism, how she was shaped by major historical events, and how the way she spent her days—first as a domestic worker and later as gatekeeper at North Carolina’s Airlie Gardens—impacted her art as much as her extrasensory experiences. After The Lost World debuts in Atlanta, Evans’s work will make a triumphant return to the Whitney in summer 2026.
