CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/5/2026

Minnie Evans’ divine visions of a lost world

Untitled (Many-Eyed Form) (1945) is reproduced from new release The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The first major survey of Evans’ divinely inspired works on paper since the 1990s, this is, amazingly, the only book in print on this important self-taught artist. “In March 1971,” curator Katherine Jentleson writes, “Minnie Evans sat for a rare interview with Celestine Ware, a Black feminist author and activist. At the time, Ware was producing a radio series on Black women artists, and she’d become fascinated by the work of Evans, who was still four years shy of her breakthrough solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art but increasingly well known outside her home¬town of Wilmington, North Carolina. ‘What is the lost world of Minnie Evans?’ Ware asks near the end of the interview. Initially, Evans appears reluctant to answer: ‘I don’t know about that,’ she demurs. But Ware continues to press, and eventually, Evans relents, explaining that she has been experiencing visions her entire life, including ones involving the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. ‘Nations have been destroyed,’ she says. ‘And a lot of [the] pictures that God has given me [he’d] brought back from different nations […] according to the Bible there is thousands of nations that’s been destroyed and nobody knew anything about them.’”