The Art of Getting Lost in Minnie Evans

A man buys a drawing. A terrible friction materializes between the two of them, the man and the drawing, the latter of which might have been a vision on paper of existence on another plane—a flat botanical realm, rainbow-bright, governed by floating, expressionless heads. The symmetry, the sense of exact echoing across a central median, an inescapable reversibility. Harmony, as a force of relation, dominates; here is the telegraphing of a closed world accessible seemingly only to one. He can’t get in. Does he want to? He returns the piece, an extraordinary gesture of sensitivity and respect that I do not think would have been an affront to Minnie Evans, the artist, as she herself had felt knocked, again and again, off axis by the energy of her yield.

The extent of her yield, done over fifty years—we can’t count it. Her fearsome paradisical pieces have been flung like seed across the continents in an informal way. A share, nearly one hundred paintings and drawings—organized with passion and concern, initially, by the curator Katherine Jentleson, in Atlanta, and more recently by Barbara Haskell, in New York—lives on the eighth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art until January of next year.

Here I am, at the exhibit, “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans,” trying not to be the man who could not handle being in space. I am surrounded by brown pulp that shows the evidence of her hand, an instrument at turns weighty, mathematical, and fleet. And, on this paper, mandalas, like sliced-open eggs, carry the expressionless heads, who seem to have no relation to anything like humanity, though they have our features, they have our eyelashed eyes—multiples of them—which, like the slow explosions of flora, the horned mammals, the scaled serpents, float ungrounded in her overloaded compositions. The “ground” in Evans’s drawings, which she, in a compulsive period of production, made with pencil and crayon, is often a sparse grove of trees, etched toward the bottom third of the paper, just barely suggesting the physical world from which her almost psychedelic beings jut forward, as if they are attached to a compressed spring, a jack-in-the-box of consciousness. Close your eyes intermittently. You will have to; the optic nerve needs to recover. And in the darkness you will remember her pet colors are pinks, greens, and oranges—secondaries, the colors of volubility, that always suggest the clash and the mix of the primaries that make them.

The show at the Whitney is an echo of the past. The photographer Nina Howell Starr guest-curated an exhibition, in 1975, of Evans’s work at the museum, making her the third Black woman to have a solo show at the institution. Controversy came—from members of the cosmopolitan Black art scene, who had been protesting modern art museums like the Whitney for not exhibiting more work by Black artists. It seemed to them like an insult to bring Evans to the level of an innovative star like Alma Thomas, the first Black woman to get a Whitney solo show. How had Evans, an untrained artist, who may not have known, all these years she had been drawing, that she even was an artist, become a pawn in New York? Evans was ranked as “primitive,” a double-edged epithet, coming from where it did. Her fantastical Biblical scenes, of a graphic, storybook sensibility, sometimes showed angels, and Christ himself, as chalky white, and this rang in some Black critical circles as a sign of backwater unsophistication. (Curators have been mining the underappreciated artists of Afro-Surrealism for the past couple of years, but I wish that today’s show had been staged earlier, in the twenty-tens, when debates about representation in painting were at a higher pitch.) But Evans herself had no truck with polemics. It wasn’t useful for the expression of her pleasure and her pain. She was the highest level of abstractionist: she distilled humanity to its most perfect point, before race and before war.

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