Minnie Evans and the Soul of Wilmington
Raised in the aftermath of the 1898 massacre of her people, Minnie Evans responded to a divine call to “draw or die.” Today, her visionary art invites us to confront our history.
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
The South is a place eternally haunted by sin and seeking salvation, an element of our communal character that often emerges in the work of our artists, whether by conscious intent or like sweat beading on the brow of a guilty man. Patterson Hood, one of my favorite songwriters, wrote, “There’s a lot of bad wood underneath the veneer,” and we Southerners live with that truth, particularly since, as William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Faulkner’s assertion is certainly true in Wilmington, North Carolina, a town in which my family has lived for thirteen years. I love this beautiful place with its lifestyle driven by the tides and the rhythm of horse hooves pulling buggy tours over brick-paved streets. I enjoy a creative arts community enlivened by Wilmington’s film and television industry. Though my waistline rues it, my tastebuds adore a vibrant food scene that outshines those of larger cities. I can surf at dawn, hunt or fish in the afternoon, and eat dinner in an award-winning restaurant where I might look up from a magazine article about an actor to ask the subject, in town to film a movie and sitting one table over, what she’s eating. But the truth is it ain’t all Coastal Living and USA Today’s “Top Ten Things to Do in Wilmington.” There’s some bad wood underneath the veneer.
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
Before the Civil War, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city, with more than half of its residents freed or enslaved Black people. In the decades after the war’s end in 1865, protected by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, Black North Carolinians, or at least Black men, took roles in governance, built businesses, and established civic mainstays like the newspaper The Daily Record. Wilmington became a city in which people recently liberated from bondage could build lives.
That all changed on November 10, 1898, when a mob of 2,000 white supremacists led by Confederate veterans, Southern Democrats, and a paramilitary group known as the “Red Shirts” massacred a still-unknown number of Black citizens, displaced thousands more, burned the offices of The Daily Record and ran its editor Alex Manly out of town.
Former Confederate officer and U.S. Congressman Alfred Moore Waddell stood on the same stage upon which my family now watches The Nutcracker at Christmas and called for the white citizens of Wilmington to “choke the Cape Fear [River] with carcasses.” By the end of the day, Waddell had taken the mayorship at gunpoint, bodies were indeed floating in the Cape Fear, and countless Black Americans escaped to hide in the same swamps and pine forests in which they had been enslaved only a few decades before. Three decades of progress had been dismantled in the violence of one afternoon, and Wilmington added “home to the only successful coup d’état in American history” to the list of things unique about this place. Through it all, and in the decades after, as survivors told stories of eyes peering from the woods to see if it was safe to emerge into the open, a little girl named Minnie Evans watched and listened. She was the child of a child, the scion of enslaved people brought in bondage from Trinidad. Born at a wide spot in a dirt road, Evans bore witness to man’s inhumanity to man and heard the stories from her relatives who lived it.
Hers would have been a quiet life, one likely passed unremarked, had she not, in 1935, answered the call of a voice that told her, “Draw or die!”
And though it would not be for decades, her art would tell the story.
Minnie Eva Evans was born on December 12, 1892, to a thirteen-year-old mother and a husband and father who soon left them both behind. Minnie and her mother moved in with Minnie’s maternal grandmother in a community called Wrightsville Sound, a place where Black Americans could live, if they worked as domestics in the homes of wealthy whites or as “sounders” drawing their living from the salt and marsh. Today, the folks who service the wealthy have moved inland, and Wrightsville Sound is called Wrightsville Beach, where $1.7 million gets you three beds and two baths, if your offer comes fast enough.
As a child, Evans saw visions that kept her awake through the night. The images would someday be the source of art that seemed to come from somewhere divine, but for a child, they meant sleep deprivation and problems at school. In the Jim Crow South, it didn’t take much to end a poor Black girl’s education, particularly for one who had trouble paying attention to things beyond the visions she saw and the voices she heard in her head. Evans left school after sixth grade. By the time she was sixteen, she had lied about her age to marry Julius Caesar Evans, ultimately having three children with him.
Both Evanses found employment and residence at “Pembroke Park,” the hunting estate of a man named Pembroke Jones. Jones died in 1919, and his wife, Sadie, married a man named Henry Walters. She moved a few miles away to the Airlie Estate and took Julius and Minnie Evans with her. Wilmington’s history is one of reinvention, and like Wrightsville Sound, Pembroke Park has changed names over the intervening century. Now called “Landfall,” it’s 2,200 acres of gates, golf courses, and 24/7 security patrols. Likewise, the private Airlie Estate eventually sold in 1948, becoming the public Airlie Gardens, where Minnie Evans worked taking admission tickets until she retired in 1974. Hers would have been a quiet life, one likely passed unremarked, had she not, in 1935, answered the call of a voice that told her, “Draw or die!”
Minnie Evans had seen the sin. Now she sought salvation in art.
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
Evans’ first two pieces, meta-titled My Very First and My Second, were pen and ink drawings done in response to the dreams and visions in which she said the works were revealed to her. Despite the urging of heavenly voices, it would be 1940 before she again answered the call of “an angel that stands by me... and directs me what to do,” beginning thirty years of almost compulsive art production.
At a rate that made some friends and family question her mental health, Evans produced thousands of images inspired by nature, mythology, spirituality, and stories she heard from formerly enslaved relatives and friends. She used a rainbow of shaded and layered pencil, crayons, and oils on paper, cloth, wood, and canvas. Her work often features symmetrical patterns, human and animal faces, and disembodied eyes surrounded by, perhaps emerging from, flowers and foliage. Looking upon them, one must consider those Black Wilmingtonians in 1898, already dispossessed of their homes, peering from the pine forests and hoping to keep their lives.
Evans was also inspired by her surroundings at Airlie Gardens, where she sold her work from the Admissions shack for fifty cents. She often gave her art away, saying she had no more insight into her work than the recipients, or as Regenia Perry quoted her in 1992, “When I get through with them, I have to look at them like everybody else. They are just as strange to me as they are to anybody else.”
It was 1961 before Evans’s first formal gallery show took place at the Artist’s Gallery in Wilmington. Ten years later, she donated two pieces of her work to Wilmington’s St. John’s Museum, now the Cameron Arts Museum. At her death on December 16, 1987, Evans left more than 400 works to what is now Wilmington’s premier art exhibition center and the single largest repository of her work.
“Minnie Evans gave most of her artwork away, or she might have sold things for a dollar, and so during her lifetime Minnie Evans did not receive the financial benefit of her artwork.”
Of course, in the way of Wilmington, Evans’ work commands a steeper price now, selling for tens of thousands of dollars to a devoted collector base in the rare cases in which owners decide to part with it. The sad fact is that Evans’ descendants have no way to benefit when her paintings change hands on the art market. The Cameron Museum does what it can to address that injustice.
“Now you can see her work go for six figures at auctions, and the family doesn’t get any of this,” says the Cameron’s executive director, Heather Wilson. “So, we make sure that when we sell items in our gift shop that are inspired by Minnie, some of that money goes back to her family.”
To address that, the museum has built an ongoing relationship with the Evans family.
“We do sell items in the shop that are inspired by Minnie’s work, and part of the proceeds from that go back to Minnie’s family,” Wilson says, “because one of the things we recognize and want to put right is that Minnie Evans gave most of her artwork away, or she might have sold things for a dollar, and so during her lifetime Minnie Evans did not receive the financial benefit of her artwork.”
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
All images of Minnie Evans paintings are from the Collection of Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, © Estate of Minnie Jones Evans
Though Evans’ thousands of works are dear to own, it is currently possible to see the results of her divine inspiration in a traveling exhibition of the work of a woman who left North Carolina only once in her life. Having already concluded a show at the Gund Museum at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Evans’ work is on display through October 26, 2025, at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, before a planned return home to Wilmington and the Cameron Art Museum.
The Evans exhibition can travel to museums in smaller cities—like the Gund—or even major metropolitan museums like Boston’s MFA thanks to the Arkansas-based Art Bridges Foundation. Art Bridges CEO Anne Kraybill says the foundation’s goal is to “help level the planes so that communities have access to all kinds of narratives in American art history.” Art Bridges connects lender institutions with those who can deliver objects of artistic and cultural significance to communities that could not see them otherwise. Kraybill says Art Bridges founder, philanthropist, and arts patron Alice Walton, living as she does in Bentonville, Arkansas, recognizes, “Most of these smaller regional museums just don’t have the same endowments that larger major metros do for these kinds of things.”
“Minnie Evans and her artwork, not only is it just beautiful to look at, but understanding the genesis of it, where it came from, what motivated her...I think allows Wilmington to imagine what they want their future to be.”
In pairing under-resourced venues with well-endowed lender institutions, Art Bridges also addresses “a moral question about whether or not institutions should continue to collect large amounts of things if they don’t have the ability to care for them. And so, in a way, lending takes that burden off of these institutions. They can still bring great works, but they don’t have to be responsible for the financial obligation in perpetuity.”
Giving more Americans access to the work of a woman such as Minnie Evans, who gave so much of herself away, seems a righteous mission—particularly in a world so filled with inequities in wealth and justice. That kind of world, after all, was the one in which Minnie Evans lived.
Except for three years away, I have lived in Wilmington since 2012. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past when I didn’t know who Minnie Evans was, nor anything of her lived experience. Realizing her ubiquity in the town I’ve adopted, I ask Anne Kraybill her thoughts on the value of those learned experiences.
“I think that's the critical part of this, right?” Kraybill says. “People need to not only see themselves represented in institutions like art museums, but they need to be able to understand the stories and the narratives of other experiences, other lived experiences.... I mean, it kind of gets back to what makes us human, right? Our ability to be empathetic. And I think without having a portal into those narratives and those stories, we’re not exercising the strongest muscle that we have. So, part of also imagining your future, the future of Wilmington, is being able to really understand and unpack the past from multiple perspectives. So having a story like Minnie Evans and her artwork, not only is it just beautiful to look at, but understanding the genesis of it, where it came from, what motivated her, her story, and the setting in which she created these things and the family that she worked for, I think allows Wilmington to imagine what they want their future to be.”
All images of Minnie Evans paintings are from the Collection of Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, © Estate of Minnie Jones Evans
Artist Minnie Evans | 1898 Wilmington massacre | writer Russell Worth Parker
Today, Wilmington’s future undeniably holds a place for a woman who, but for a few miles of geography separating her from Wilmington’s downtown when she was six years old, might have never found a life there, much less become a world-famous artist. For the perpetrators of Wilmington’s massacre to have been able to suppress her legacy would have been a tragedy, one that meant a different town and a different future than the one only now truly becoming manifest.
As Heather Wilson says, “Could you imagine the world without Minnie Evans? Could you imagine Wilmington without Minnie Evans? That would be tragic. I mean, we would have lost this representation of a person’s experience, of a person's connection with the divine, of a person in this one particular time and place engaging with the world. And I really think that what art can do for all of us is to connect us with our shared humanity. And I think that when you look at Minnie Evans' work, you can't help but connect with her humanity.”
May we all seek to do so, and in the doing find salvation.
Russell Worth Parker is a retired United States Marine turned writer. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and daughter. Worth writes for an array of publications including The New York Times, Garden and Gun Magazine, Salvation South, Backcountry Journal, Shooting Sportsman Magazine, Salt Magazine, and websites such as SOFLETE.com, DieLiving.Com, and several commercial and nonprofit websites.
Growing up on the beach, we’d ride our bikes across the bridge to Airlie Gardens. “Miz Minnie” would draw pictures for us – with crayons on whatever paper she had (often grocery bags). On the way home, we’d toss them away because our mamas forbade us to ride across the Waterway, and we couldn’t risk getting caught. How I wish I had those pictures today! Thank you for this story. It’s one I wish I’d written.
Best regards,
Deb