Image: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will open ‘The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans’ on August 22, presenting a new examination of the self-taught artist’s work more than five decades after the institution gave Evans her first solo museum exhibition in 1975. The exhibition will remain on view through January 10, 2027.
Evans (1892–1987) began drawing in 1935, following the death of her grandmother, and continued to produce art over the subsequent decades. Her work includes pencil and crayon drawings, oil paintings and collages, many of them built from dense, symmetrical and kaleidoscopic arrangements. The Whitney describes the imagery as combining references to Evans’s Afro-Caribbean heritage, mythology, religion, popular culture, decorative arts and the natural environment of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Angels, mythical creatures, watchful faces and intricate patterns recur across the works. Together, these elements evoke a spiritual realm that Evans referred to as the “lost world”—a protective province she imagined as existing before the biblical flood. Her compositions have been described by the museum as both evocative and mysterious, suggesting harmony and transcendence while retaining an unsettling sense of disquiet.
Evans’s work began to receive national recognition during the 1960s. Following small gallery exhibitions in Wilmington and New York, she was profiled in Newsweek in 1969. Group exhibitions at museums followed, leading to the Whitney’s one-person presentation in 1975. The museum’s current artist record identifies Evans with several overlapping traditions, including Southern folk art, outsider art, surrealism and visionary art.
‘The Lost World’ is organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and curated by Katherine Jentleson, the High Museum’s Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art. The Whitney presentation is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, with Caroline Webb, Curatorial Assistant. Major support comes from the Barbara Haskell American Fellows Legacy Fund and the Kapadia Equity Fund.
The exhibition will be preceded by member preview days at the Whitney from August 19 through 21. The museum has also scheduled ‘The Art of Minnie Evans: A Conversation’ for September 9, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., followed by a Member Night on October 28. The presentation will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from August 22, 2026, to January 10, 2027.
