Untitled [visionary garden design]

Minnie Evans lived and worked in coastal North Carolina within a deeply religious community. She began making art at age forty-three when, she said that God had directed her to draw the elaborate visions and dreams that she had experienced since childhood. She typically depicted a frontal face haloed with scallop, floral, and leaf designs. Sometimes flowers turned into disembodied eyes, as in Untitled. In the 1960s, Evans worked on a larger scale and created collages from earlier crayon drawings that she glued onto canvas boards and painted. A classic example of this process, Untitled also showcases Evans’ rigorously symmetrical and pyramidal compositional style.

While making art, Evans worked as a gatekeeper for Airlie Gardens, a 67-acre garden fantastically landscaped with half a million flowers located in Wilmington, North Carolina, owned by a wealthy family who allowed her to study their artworks and Chinese and Persian carpets. Both the garden and the art influenced her work, as did a 1966 trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Evans’ work was later collected by major art world figures, including the French painter and "outsider art" theorist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985).