The Lost World - The Art of Minnie Evans Catalogue

The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans

Edited with text by Katherine Jentleson. Foreword by Rand Suffolk. Text by Kim Conaty, María Elena Ortiz, Elizabeth Penton, Wayne Evans.

Minnie Evans once said her drawings of harmoniously intertwined human, botanical, and animal forms came from visions of “the lost world,” or nations destroyed by the Great Flood as described in the Book of Genesis. After her grandmother died in 1934 and the visions she experienced in childhood became stronger, Evans produced a large body of work ranging from abstract to representational styles. Though she found fame beyond her community in Wilmington, North Carolina—in 1975 she was among the first Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—she has not been the subject of a major exhibition since the 1990s.

This catalogue, the first book to reproduce Evans’s richly colored work on a large scale, accompanies the High Museum of Art’s exhibition The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, which will travel to the Whitney in 2026, marking a full-circle moment for the artist. Contributed essays consider a recent surge of scholarship on Evans and provide new contexts for her work, including the impact of her labor at Airlie Gardens, a connection to Caribbean Surrealism, and her identity as an artist and matriarch.

DELMONICO BOOKS/HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

ISBN 9781636812199

$45

Hardcover

9.75 x 10.75 in.

192 pages