Minnie evans arts center

A Few Facts about Minnie Evans:

~Minnie Evans (Jones) was the only child of Joseph Kelly, a farmer, and Ella Jones in Pender County, North Carolina.

~ Minnie Evans attended school through the sixth grade, dropping out in 1903 because of the family's economic hardship, finding a job as a "sounder" selling shellfish door to door.

~In 1908 she quit to marry Julius Evans. For eight years she was a full-time housewife. The couple had three sons.

~The Evans family lived on Jones's 2,200-acre hunting estate, "Pembroke Park," known today as the subdivision Landfall.

~Evans began drawing on Good Friday, 1935. She said "I had a dream, its voice spoke to me: ‘Why don't you draw or die?' ‘Is that it?,' I said, ‘My, My.'"

~That morning she completed a pair of small pen-and-ink drawings on paper; these works, dominated by a pattern of concentric circles and semicircles upon a background of lines, became greatly significant to her in her later life.

~Most of her earliest pieces were executed in wax crayons; she later turned to colored pencil and, in the early 1940s, oils.

~Earlier, when Evans's world was dominated by the greenery of Pembroke Park, her paintings were full of shades of green. But, after 1948, her work began to bloom in colors and in images of actual flowers, for Minnie Evans was then the Airlie gatekeeper - collecting admissions and selling her artwork on the side.

 ~In 1961, she had her first formal exhibition of drawings and oils at a gallery in Wilmington.

~In 1966, Evans' had her first New York exhibit and, in 1975 a major Minnie Evans exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art became the talk of the town.

~Evans died December 16, 1987, leaving more than 400 artworks to the St. Johns Museum of Art (now the Cameron Art Museum) in Wilmington.