Minnie Evans Study Center

Minnie Eva Jones was born December 12, 1892, in the village of Long Creek, Pender County, North Carolina.  As a baby, she and her young mother, Ella, moved with her grandparents to live in nearby Wilmington, North Carolina.  Her early years were shaped by her grandmother Mary Croom Jones Robinson while they lived among many relatives in a prospering interracial section of the port town.  Minnie was almost six years old at the time of the white supremacist Wilmington Coup of 1898.

As a child Minnie’s great-grandmother Rachael told her the story of her maternal ancestor Moni, who was enslaved in Trinidad and traded to Charleston, South Carolina, with her five children and husband.  She and her only surviving daughter were brought to Duplin County, North Carolina around the year 1800.  Details in Evans family oral history also allow her heritage to be traced back to 1800 in New Hanover County on her paternal side.

Minnie attended high-quality schools through part of the sixth grade, an average amount of schooling for blacks and just under that of whites of the time.  She and her mother moved to Wrightsville Sound in 1903. There, she began to work as a Sounder, selling shellfish she gathered in the coastal marshes at the downtown Market in Wilmington.  In 1908, Minnie married Julius Evans of Wrightsville Sound.  The couple had three sons, Elisha, David, and George.  Julius Evans worked for millionaire Pembroke Jones and his even wealthier wife, Sarah Wharton Green Jones.  Julius and Minnie lived on the Pembroke Park property near the Italianate style mansion of his employers.  When Sadie Jones was widowed, she remarried Henry Walters, a railroad executive whose father had founded the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and who also frequented Wrightsville Sound.

After a number of years tending to her own home and children, Minnie began employment in domestic service for Mrs. Walters in her home on the Airlie property.  Both there and at Pembroke Park, she had been exposed to fine art of all sorts – though none of these items significantly resemble her artwork.  Perhaps more influential to Minnie’s mind was the fact that Mrs. Walters was invested in coaxing her sound-side estate into a garden full of live oaks, magnolias, camellias, and azaleas.  The area would eventually become Airlie Gardens but Minnie had already been steeped in the beauty of the landscape for decades before it opened to the public.

Shortly after her dear grandmother Mary died in 1934, Minnie executed three small drawings in pencil on the back of grocery-list paper.  She stuck them into a magazine where they remained for several years.  In cleaning out her home one fall, she threw the magazine and other trash into a fire in the back yard when the works slipped out and two fell to the ground.  Moved by this event and seeing it as a sign, Minnie reworked the two salvaged sketches in pen on paper.   From that day on, she began drawing consistently, using graphite pencil, colored pen and wax crayons.  My Very First and My Second are now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Minnie began working as the ticket-taker at the Airlie Gardens gate in 1948.  The lush botanical surroundings resonated with her and found expression in her art, as did her love of history and Greek mythology from her school days.  These influences, combined with her Christian upbringing and careful reading of the Bible, fed into her own intensely imaginative inner visual life which she described as dreaming.  From the late 1930’s until close to her death, she created thousands and thousands of drawings and paintings.

In 1962, Minnie met New York photographer Nina Howell Starr who became her friend and advocate.  Starr and her husband helped arrange two exhibits of Minnie’s work in 1966 in New York, bringing exposure to her art and slowly raising the value of its sales.  From that time on, Evans’ works were featured in exhibitions in New York and eventually across the country and overseas.  Today, they can be found in major museums and academic institutions in the United States and in many private collections.

The Cameron Art Museum is home to the Minnie Evans Study Center and is committed to preserving and researching her life and work.  The Study Center, which was funded by the North Carolina Arts Council, serves as an archive of important papers and correspondence about Evans and her exhibitions, in addition to press exposure, audio and video works, interviews, and ephemera related to the artist.

For more information on Minnie Evans and the Minnie Evans Study Center, please contact Susan Whisnant, Registrar of Collections and Exhibitions at [email protected].