Obituaries - Dec. 22, 1987

Minnie Evans, Leading Black Folk Artist

Minnie Evans, 95, an artist whose works were permeated by religious symbols and visions. A descendant of slaves, she was a domestic in her early years and then worked as a ticket taker at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, N.C., where she began to sell her work to visitors. Eventually small exhibits of her work were shown in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s and she became known as one of America’s leading black folk artists. After an exhibition of her paintings--some of which she made on window shades and scraps of cheap paper--at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, she achieved a national following. In Wilmington on Wednesday.