Minnie Evans' 'Lost World' is a reminder of the stories art tells about the South

Caption

The 1962 photo, "Minnie Evans at Gatehouse, Airlie Gardens" by Nina Howell Starr, is on display at Atlanta's High Museum through April 19, 2026.

Credit: © 2025 Estate of Nina Howell Starr. Courtesy of MARCH gallery.

The High Museum’s new exhibition, "The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans," opens Nov. 15 and runs through April 19, 2026. 

The show examines the beauty of the artist's mystical visions — and the injustices and progress of the era that inspired them, from her birth in 1892 to her death in 1987.

A self-taught artist, Evans grew up in North Carolina during the Jim Crow laws. The Lost World is a reminder of the stories that art tells about the South and the continuum of the African American experience from the post-Reconstruction years to the 1980s. Evans' fantastical drawings, made in oil, pencil and crayon, capture both nightmares and dreams for a better world. 

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City mounted a show of Evans's work in 1975, where she was one of the first Black women artists to receive such recognition. This new High Museum show is the first major exhibition of her work since the 1990s.

Katherine Jentleson, High Museum Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, told GPB, "Minnie Evans is an artist who is so important to better understanding African American culture and experience in the South because her life transcended the 19th into the 20th centuries."

 Evans was a small child when her family witnessed the deadly massacre and coup d'état in 1898 Wilmington, N.C.

"She and her family suffered greatly from the aftermath of that," Jentleson said. "It certainly gave her nightmares and was part of her dreams and visionary practice that stayed with her her whole entire life."

"And then she lived through the civil rights movement and then saw her own art embraced by institutions outside of North Carolina," Jentleson said. "She lived through these experiences, harrowing, you know, the fight for equality and representation. And then her art itself reflects all of these poles of experience."

Jentleson called Evans "the ultimate alchemist." 

"She was always harmonizing the good, the bad, the ugly, the joyful, the painful," she said. "So I think she's just a brilliant representation of how one takes their life and carries on and creates something extraordinarily beautiful from it."