In Atlanta, the desire for critical art writing has spurred many heated debates on the question of responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to write critically about the arts in the Southeast? Which writers have the knowledge and care to write well-informed cultural analyses and critiques without regional prejudice—and, more candidly, without gender or racial prejudice? These debates have become more impassioned since Art Papers, an international art magazine based in Atlanta, announced that the organization will sunset in 2026 after 50 years, leaving the region without its oldest and arguably most critical voice for the arts.
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I was hosting a small gathering of local art workers at my home when this debate made its way into conversation, as did the forthcoming retrospective of the late self-taught artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987), organized by the city’s High Museum of Art and set to travel to the Whitney. Transparently, I turned down the opportunity to review the exhibition due to conflict of interest: One of the curators, Katherine Jentleson, is a respected local colleague who has helped build an incredible collection of Evans’s artwork at the museum. My colleagues in the room emphatically disagreed and expressed that far beyond the maintenance of institutional collegiality, it is my responsibility to contribute what I know as a Black man and scholar to larger discourses on self-taught artists, especially those who are Black. My editor agreed.
A popular image of Evans, captured by the art historian and photographer Nina Howell Starr (1903–2000), shows the artist resting her arms on a windowsill at Airlie Gardens, in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she was employed. Evans, hands clasped, looks directly into the camera. Her form is bathed in shadow from her booth at the botanical garden’s gates, while sunlight graces the fullness of her face. Evans is posed and aware. This picture is where I was first introduced to Evans: not through her brightly colored drawings, but through the camera lens of a white woman. And this is how Evans’s narrative has persisted: not through increasing critical engagement with the artwork itself, but through the mediation of Starr, a well-educated white woman from New Jersey.
It is necessary to call attention to all that we cannot know about Evans and the reprecussions of that ignorance. What role did race and class play in the personal and professional relationships between Evans and Starr? I speculate that Evans was well aware of the power differential between the two women when Starr appeared with her camera in the 1960s. But how cooperative was Evans in the shaping of her narrative, and was that cooperation coming from a place of business savvy or fear?
Untitled (Statuary, Stars, and Flora), 1965.
©Estate of Minnie Jones Evans
EVANS WAS BORN in Long Creek, North Carolina. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in nearby Wrightsville Sound, where she would find her husband, bear three children, and live out the rest of her life. Evans is best known for creating vivid botanical vignettes that feature spiritual, mythological, and surrealist imagery. With her limited education and lack of formal art training, Evans’s artistic impulse was an expression of her relationship with God. She created rainbow-colored drawings with Crayola crayons that were inspired by dreams and visions that had afflicted her since childhood.
While working as a gatekeeper, selling admission tickets to the botanical gardens, Evans would display, sell, and gift her works to visitors, eventually making a name for herself locally. Her first formal exhibition was mounted in 1961 at the Artists Gallery (which became St. Johns Museum of Art, then the Cameron Art Museum), in Wilmington. Before meeting Starr, Evans claimed the title of artist and sold her work on her own, evidently entrepreneurial and aware of her talent.
Evans was then soon “discovered” by Starr, who, at age 60, was enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Florida, studying photography. After a friend showed Starr Evans’s drawings, Starr set out to formally meet the artist in 1962, seriously considering Evans as a potential subject for her master’s thesis. Camera and tape recorder in tow, Starr traveled to North Carolina and began recording interviews and conversations with Evans. These would continue for just over 10 years.
Shortly after meeting and building rapport, Starr became Evans’s art dealer. Through Starr’s advocacy, Evans landed a breakout New York exhibition, soon followed by an exhibition at the Whitney in 1975, for which Starr was made guest curator. By the time Evans died in 1987, Starr had been named the executor of the artist’s estate. Starr championed Evans and created a platform for her that, due to racial, regional, and gender prejudice, she most likely could not have established on her own. Thanks to Starr, not only were many of Evans’s works sold, preserved, and collected by institutions, but hours of audio recordings and transcribed conversations were made accessible through such institutions as the Smithsonian. Within these archives, Evans speaks about her life, her faith, and her art in her own words. “I have been told in a Dream that my pictures is lost art of Nations passed and gone … But God has given it to me to bring [them] back into world,” Minnie Evans penned in a 1962 letter to Nina Howell Starr.
It is not a stretch to say that I might not know who Evans was if not for Starr’s efforts. But at the same time, I may never fully trust the archival material Starr produced—because of the unequal power dynamic between them. Starr was the white woman behind the camera, mediating the conversations and asking the questions. Well-intentioned or not, Starr had the power and the resources to carry out her work as she saw fit and had the final say on what images, audiotapes, and texts are available to scholars like me today. Ethical questions must be asked when acknowledging that Starr, who is credited with “discovering” Evans, became not only the curatorial and art historical authority on Evans’s practice, but also directly profited from the selling and display of her work. One wonders, too, how a married Black woman with grown children ended up with a white woman as the executor of her estate.
Before selling tickets at Airlie Gardens, Evans worked as a domestic for a wealthy white family that also employed her husband. Surely this Black woman, descendent of enslaved folks, raised in a pre-Civil Rights-era South, was well aware of the danger in not conducting oneself “properly” among white people. This is often expressed as subjugation—humble, grateful, ignorant. Starr, who at best was a kind and industrious white woman of her time, likely also had some awareness, however limited by her pre-Civil Rights context. At worst, she used her power to extract from this Black woman amid the 20th-century craze of “folk art fever.” Owing to all aforementioned ambiguity, Starr’s voice is intentionally omitted from this article.
A Dream, Prophets in the Air, 1959.
©Estate of Minnie Jones Evans (2); From top: Courtesy North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh
AS MUSEUMS TODAY REVISIT Evans’s work, it raises the question: Have the power dynamics between Southern, Black self-taught artists and white Northern scholars and institutions been truly problematized, and in the present, have those dynamics changed much?
My suspicion of Starr is fueled by my own recent experience. I worked on “William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision” (2023) while employed as Assistant Curator: Arts of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Edmondson (1874–1951) was a self-taught maker based in Nashville who became famous after he was “discovered” by model and playwright Sidney Mttron Hirsch and then photographed and championed by photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Edmondson, like Evans, started making later in life, carving his limestone tombstones after he received a vision from God. He also made a name for himself locally, before his “discovery.” Like Starr, Dahl-Wolfe traveled South to photograph Edmondson at work in his yard, which also functioned as his workshop and showroom. These photographs, which remain popular today, even led to a small 1937 exhibition of his sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—the museum’s first solo show by a Black artist.
Despite this institutional recognition, unlike Evans, Edmondson did not call himself an artist: He was a tombstone cutter whose business making grave markers and lawn ornaments for his segregated Black community became co-opted by “folk art fever.” Edmondson’s popularity meant his work was widely collected and circulated; but it also meant that a host of his tombstones were stolen from the graves of Black folks in Nashville to be sold in the art market.
While assisting on the Barnes’s Edmondson show, I advocated excluding the Dahl-Wolfe photographs, hoping to allow audiences to confront Edmondson’s work on its own terms. But in the end, the choice was made to include images of his face, which means we had to also include Dahl-Wolfe. It was important to me to consider the fidelity and ethics of the titles of sculptures, which have been renamed as the artworks have changed owners. It was important to me to portray Edmondson as a man who read the newspaper, went to the movies, and had a community of friends and family.
Dahl-Wolfe’s photographs are problematic to me because they are used to represent Edmondson’s reality, but are clearly staged. I can see the tension in his poses. I can see the stiffness in his spine. I imagine myself, a single Black man in the South, who owns his home and supports his extended family, suddenly confronted by a white woman with a camera. Dahl-Wolfe just showed up in his yard and supposedly asked to make his portrait. Did he feel safe enough to say no?
At the Barnes, I pored over all the exhibition texts, attempting to protect Edmondson from the same narrow and stereotypical reads of the past. I did all this to keep him human. I felt that was my responsibility.
THE ANGEL THAT STANDS by Me: Minnie Evans’ Paintings is a short documentary on her life produced in 1983. In it, Evans is shown sitting on the porch with her three sons. One of her sons leans over to ask how it felt to be famous. She responds, “I don’t even know. I can’t feel it.” Looking directly at the camera and raising her eyebrows, she says, “I can’t realize it.”
Spirituality is often emphasized in writing on Evans’s work, as if her Christian faith authenticates her compulsion to create as a Southern Black woman. I would not be so bold as to invalidate her beliefs—but then again, what if she was more knowing than she is given credit for? Do we trust her at her word and believe her own highly fantastical recounting of visions and divine purpose? Given that she clearly understood fame and notoriety, what would it mean if we speculated that her spirituality was a performance—first and foremost for her safety, but also for an attempt at fame?
There is a history, after all, of Black American historical narratives penned by white mediators that emphasize the spiritual as spectacle. Nat Turner’s rebellion narrative was written by Thomas R. Gray and published in a pamphlet in 1831, foregrounding Turner’s claims of receiving visions from God to liberate his people. Harriet Tubman’s rebellion narrative, written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford in 1869, is driven by Tubman’s claim of receiving visions from God to liberate her people. Do we read these narratives as a recognition of the power of Christian faith, or as the persistence of making caricatures of Black revolutionaries? The magical negro is a stereotype of a Black person said to possess special powers or unique insight that are often used in narratives to serve and protect white people. Is it possible that these well-meaning white writers could not comprehend a Black person with the skill, craft, genius, or bravery to resist systems of oppression? That it might be unfathomable for them to see a Black person create something beautiful without the assistance of an Old Testament God? Is it so damning to speculate that Evans played up her faith to attract the attention of her white patron, or to give her work meaning that white audiences could understand?
Then again, what if Evans was, in fact, a prophet, and her spiritual power was commodified by a white woman with a camera? Or what if Starr was an incredible businesswoman and helped secure financial freedom for a Black artist, as well as for herself? What if Evans and Starr were best friends and loved each other dearly? Making space for inquiry makes space for humanity and offers us the opportunity to read Evans as an actor in her own artistic success. The retrospective offers us a chance tosidestep othering narratives from the past andconsider her work on its own terms.
