Artist Profile: Minnie Eva Jones Evans (1892-1987)

Minnie Evans is one of the first artists I think of when I think of shamanic art, because she made no secret of the fact that a spirit, an angel, stood near her and counselled her as she worked. (She said: “God has sent me teachers: the angel that stands by me, stands by me and directs me what to do.” And, “(I’ll) Say, “What on earth this picture be?” And I keep putting it down, until after awhile He’ll say, “That’s right. Minnie, that’s right. All right.”)

Her work glows with power, repeating ancient symbols and shapes which merge and morph with faces and nature images, resonant of the spiritual tradition in which she was immersed, that of American Southern Baptists. Many of her paintings show animals and beings that God told her were on earth before the flood, but are not on earth now. Her friend and agent Nina Howell Starr said, “Minnie Evans wondered at, but welcomed the ‘lost world that no one has history of’ that was so freely revealed to her.”

She was born in North Carolina in 1892, a descendant of slaves from Trinidad. Her mother was young teenager at her birth, so she was brought up by her Grandmother, with whom she was close.

She described being different; having waking visions from a young age: “The moon was shining and it drew my attention. He showed me the animals on that ring around the moon. Children said, “Minnie, what are you looking at?” Said, “I’m looking at those elephants going round the moon.” So they laughed at me: “Minnie crazy. We don’t see no elephants. We don’t see nothing.” I thought everyone could see them. I wasn’t like the other children.”

At thirteen she began to have a deepening of contact with spirits, as her dreams intensified: "Well, my whole life has been nothing but dreams. When I was thirteen years old I started having those terrible dreams. Old men dressed up like the old prophets; they would carry me down to the soldiers’ cemetery. I have woke up more times in that cemetery. My grandmother told me they wasn’t dreams that I was having. I was having visions."

Later, she worked selling oysters, was married at the age of 16 to Julius Evans, and gave birth to three sons. Within days of her Grandmother’s death, Minnie first began to draw at the age of 43: “So one night I was so tired and sleepy I had a dream. This voice spoke to me, “Why don’t you draw...or: die?” I said, “Is that it?…”

Her place of employment would play a major role in her art: she was the gatekeeper for a lush public garden ( a metaphor for paradise, reflected in her work) from 1949 until 1974, where she would later sell her works for fifty cents a piece, roughly equal to half her daily wages. Her husband often resisted her art-making, saying she was going "crazy."

Her first works were small drawings of talismanic symbol-like designs which morphed with faces and shapes—she made exactly 144 of these before going on to make larger pieces, colored with crayons and mounted on paperboard.

Surrealist artists had earlier given a name to the technique of spontaneously letting the unconscious move through the body and onto the page: automatism. This came quite easily to Minnie (she felt “something had my hand”) and she referred to this as “an engine” driving her hand.

She was mystified by her own work. She asked her friend Nina Howell Starr to interpret her work. (“She often volunteered that her pictures ‘are just as strange to me as they are to anybody else.’”)

Yet Gylbert Coker, a curator who knew her, said she was “cautious about letting other people become aware” of the thinness of the veil between her dreamings and so-called reality. He confirms that she had a shaman-like understanding of multiple realities: “there were times when Evans could barely distinguish between dreams and visions, as well as between dreams and wakeful experience.”

Many of Evan's works recall the folk art Green Man symbol, with faces emerging from plants. Other ancient symbols such as curliques, yonic leaves, lemniscates, serpents and its mandala-like symetry places her work in an visionary folk art tradition that has been expressed in various but visually-related ways, worldwide.

This skill has been variously interpreted as “recurring hallucinatory experiences (which) lead to a confused sense of reality”—although I have not found anything which confirms that Minnie’s own experience of reality was “confused,” or “hallucinatory,” according to her.

Minnie Evans experienced some of (what might be called) the secondary hallmarks of the “typical” shamanic calling during her life. She was an unusual child who had waking visions, she was challenged in puberty by deeper and scarier contact with the otherworld, she was identified as having unusual talent by a relative. She was given the choice directly by Spirit to express her spiritual arousal through art—or leave this world. She was driven by unusual fervor and energy to do her work, working on it for hours at a time, seemingly obsessed, and she followed Spirit’s counsel in guiding her work, which makes it shamanically collaborative.