“I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing,” said North Carolina folk artist Minnie Evans. “They just happen.”
On Good Friday 1935, Minnie Evans had a dream. “Why don’t you draw or die,” said a voice as she slept. “Is that it?” she said to the voice. “My, my.” Minnie Evans picked up her pens and began to draw from her dreams that next morning.
”This art that I have put out has come from the nations I suppose might have been destroyed before the flood,” Minnie said. “No one knows anything about them, but God has given it to me to bring [them] back into the world.”
It would be fitting for her work to come from many lost nations. Her sense of design, color, and form feels at once Chinese, Southeast Asian, Caribbean, and Western. God occasionally makes an appearance but her human faces also seem to echo divine imagery from India, Latin America, and ancient Greece.
Minnie passed on in 1987 but lives on through her work, which is highly valued and sought after.