Opening Nov. 14, 2025, at the High Museum of Art, The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans is the first major exhibition devoted to Evans in three decades. Bringing together more than 100 works, the show traces her practice from the 1930s to the 1960s. This span saw Evans move from intimate drawings to kaleidoscopic compositions and collages informed by visions, faith, and daily life in Wilmington, North Carolina. Before the exhibition debuts (and ahead of its travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art), Senior Curator of American Art and Boone Curator of Folk & Self-Taught Art Katherine Jentleson discusses why this is the moment to revisit Evans’s legacy—and how the “lost world” opens onto a fuller portrait of the artist.
“ … artists like Evans only truly move into the larger canons in which they belong when their work is presented with the seriousness that this exhibition and its book undertake: showing how her work evolved across time and within the larger complexities of her life and the worldview she developed around it.”
High Museum SENIOR CURATOR Katherine Jentleson
This is the first major exhibition of Minnie Evans’s work in 30 years. What made this the right moment for the High to revisit her legacy and reintroduce her to new audiences?
The High received a generous gift in 2021 that doubled our collection of Evans’s work, and I had been thinking a lot more about her since then. Also beginning around that time, her work seemed to be appearing everywhere in big contemporary art contexts like the Venice Biennale; there was clearly a wider interest in her work, and I wanted to do a show that would give people a stronger basis for understanding her art and life.
Evans described her art as coming from “the lost world.” How do you interpret that phrase, and how does the exhibition help us understand the spiritual or visionary dimensions of her practice?
Evans was a very religious person and especially loved Genesis and Revelation—books that dealt with creation, destruction, and rebirth. When people started talking to her about her art in the 1960s, she said her imagery came to her through visions of “the lost world,” or nations destroyed by the Great Flood as described in Genesis. Her first show outside of North Carolina, in New York in 1966, was called The Lost World. Our show reprises that title, out of deference to how she described her art as a kind of portal into ancient worlds and mythologies. But I am also interested in accessing the “lost world” of her daily life, acknowledging the importance of her spirituality and visions, but also unpacking how much her surroundings and life experiences influenced her artmaking.
The show traces Evans’s evolution from the 1930s through the 1960s. What shifts or breakthroughs in her technique or worldview stand out most to you across that timeline?
Evans went from very small drawings with abstract marks in pencil and pen to explosively colorful collages that harmonize human, animal, and botanical forms. Although she is best known for drawings that have been compared to Hindu or Buddhist mandalas—highly symmetrical drawings that are considered diagrams of the universe–she drew and painted in all kinds of ways, making realistic paintings of ancient temples and scenes from the life of Christ as well. And our show has it all. It shows how she was always experimenting and pushing herself. By the 1960s, she had mastered imagery and compositions that are just so complex—so overflowing with detail and emotion—that they really take your breath away.
Evans’s day jobs, as a domestic worker and later as a gatekeeper at North Carolina’s Airlie Gardens, deeply shaped her art. How does the exhibition explore the interplay between her lived environment and her imagination?
… through what is written in the labels and archival displays: historical photographs of Wilmington and the extravagant estate where she labored, which later became Airlie Gardens. These documents hint at the contradictions of beauty and ugliness in her life—how she lived under the official and unofficial social codes of the Jim Crow South in a city that was the site of one of the worst race-based coups in US history: the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, which traumatized her and her community when she was only six years old. The show’s labels, and especially its catalogue, explore how she alchemized all of this in her art, which is both incredibly beautiful, like her coastal home and the botanical gardens where she eventually worked, and also marked by notes of evil and violence.
Minnie Evans is often categorized as a self-taught or visionary artist. How is The Lost World helping to expand or challenge the boundaries of those labels within the broader canon of American art?
While I am sympathetic to well-argued critiques of terms like “folk” or “self-taught,” I don’t think the deeper problems of why and how an artist has been marginalized can be solved just by getting rid of those labels and calling an artist by broader terms, like “American.” I think artists like Evans only truly move into the larger canons in which they belong when their work is presented with the seriousness that this exhibition and its book undertake, showing how her work evolved across time and within the larger complexities of her life and the worldview she developed around it. Surrealism definitely comes into play, not just in the techniques she used—like automatic drawing and collage—but in her emphasis on visions and dreams, which were her way of experiencing and framing the transcendence that her art made possible.
This exhibition is also a homecoming of sorts before the work travels to the Whitney Museum. How do you see Evans’s story resonating differently with Atlanta/Southern audiences compared to those in New York?
Well, another reason why I included some archival material to give a sense of place to Evans’s hometown of Wilmington is that I am conscious of how people outside of the South often have no real concept of it. There is so much in Evans’s work that is a product of her specific historical moment and the place where she lived. So I hope to give New York visitors—as well as those here in Atlanta who may not be familiar with Wilmington—a bit of grounding in the place that shaped her extraordinary work. It makes me really happy that she is having a full circle moment at the Whitney, specifically, especially given all of the incredible women artists of color who they have supported with solo exhibitions in recent years, from Julie Mehretu to Amy Sherald—shows that we have also/are about to present at the High, so there is already an established connection between our programs. For her to return to the Whitney and cement her place in the ever-more-inclusive program of American art they are pursuing is a very big deal.
Beyond the galleries, what do you hope visitors will carry with them about Minnie Evans—the woman, the artist, and the visionary—after experiencing The Lost World?
I hope people leave inspired by her ability to harmonize and alchemize. Especially in a time as divided and atomized as the one we live in, the complicated unity of her pictures leaves a special kind of imprint.
If You Go
The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans opens Nov. 14, 2025, at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Organized by the High Museum of Art. (Exhibition background provided by the High Museum.)
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• Amy Sherald’s ‘American Sublime’ exhibition coming to High Museum
• High Museum to present exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu