NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art presents The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, opening August 22, 2026, just over fifty years after the Whitney organized Evans's groundbreaking first solo museum exhibition in 1975. The exhibition reintroduces audiences to one of the most extraordinary and original artistic voices in twentieth-century America.

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Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans

A visionary volume on the art of Minnie Evans

Explore Minnie Evans’s visionary world through color, symbolism, gardens, spiritual imagination, pattern, and the extraordinary force of one of America’s most distinctive self-taught artists.

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Minnie Evans began making art in her early forties and spent the following four decades creating radiant drawings, paintings, and collages inspired by dreams, visions, spiritual revelation, mythology, popular culture, and the natural world. Guided by a profound religious faith and a vivid inner life, Evans transformed flowers, birds, angels, and human faces into intricate compositions that blur the boundaries between the earthly and the divine. She described these visionary works as portals into a Biblical Eden she called the "lost world."

Bringing together works created between 1935 and 1981 in Wilmington, North Carolina during the Jim Crow era, the exhibition reveals the artist's remarkable ability to envision harmony and transcendence amid a world of social and racial tensions. Through densely layered imagery, luminous color, and recurring spiritual motifs, Evans created a body of work that remains as relevant and resonant today as when it was first made.

The exhibition arrives at a moment of renewed interest in Evans's work. While her drawings and paintings have appeared in influential exhibitions such as The Milk of Dreams at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2022) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 (2024) at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Evans has not been the subject of a major solo museum presentation since the 1990s. This landmark exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to experience the full breadth of her artistic vision and legacy.





“Evans is part of a long tradition of American artists who found sacred meaning in the natural world,” said Barbara Haskell, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Her decades of working at the Airlie Gardens gave her a profoundly personal relationship to nature. In filtering her experience of the gardens through dreams and visions that resonated with her inner life, fears, and religious faith, she created images of a lost paradise whose abundance can feel simultaneously ecstatic and claustrophobic.”

“The Whitney’s 1975 exhibition played a transformative role in introducing Evans's work to museum audiences in New York and beyond,” said Kim Conaty, the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney. “Fifty years later, we’re thrilled to train our focus once again on this exceptional artist, whose exquisite works offer a powerful lens through which to examine American history, spirituality, creativity, and resilience.”

The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans returns the artist to the institution where a historic milestone began and reflects the Whitney's ongoing commitment to expanding the story of American art by highlighting artists whose contributions have historically been overlooked. The exhibition showcases an extraordinary range of creative expression, foregrounding the achievements of a Black woman artist working independently in the American South during much of the twentieth century.

The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and curated by Katherine Jentleson, the High Museum’s Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art. The presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, with Caroline Webb, Curatorial Assistant.