"Minnie Evans Jones" (December 12,1892-December 16,1987)

Was an African American folk artist known for her colorful drawings primarily executived in crayon.
She was the only child of Joseph Kelley,a farmer,and Ella Jones of Pender County,North Carolina.Ella,then only 14 moved to Wilmington early in 1893 to live with her mama,who soon assumed responsibility for Minnie's upbringing.Minnie attended school through the sixth grade,dropping out in 1903,because 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.
Beginning in 1916,Minnie was employed as a domestic at the home of her husband's employer.Pembroke Jones.a wealthy industrialist.The Evans family lived on Jone's
2,200 acre hunting estate,"Pembroke Park,"known today as the subdivision Landfill.
Minnie 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?," "My, my."Her son,George was in the house and said she came out her bedroom door "screaming and hollering."that morning he 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,greatly significant to her later in life.Most of her earliest pieces were executed in wax crayons;she later turned to color pencil and,in the 1940s,oil.
Her first "exhibitions" were in 1948,at Airlie Gardens,which had been established by Pembroke Jone's wife,Sarah Green Jones,as a lush,flowing,naturalistic Southern garden.Earlier when Minnie world was dominated by the greenery of Pembroke Park,her paintings were full of shades of green.After 1948,her work began to bloom in colors and in drawings and oils at a gallery in Wilmington.In 1962,she became friends with Nina Howell Starr who would publicize her work for the next 25 years.In 1966,Nina arranged for Minnie's first New York first New York exhibition and, in 1975,curated a major Minnie's exhibition at the Whitney Museum of America Art.Minnie was not fazed by her new celebrity."She was just doing what the lord told her to do.She was more interested in pleasing god than people,"George Evans told Airlie historian Susan Taylor Block,in 2005.Minnie died in 1987,leaving more thn 400 artworks to the St.Johns Museum of Art (now the Cameron Art Museum) in Wilington.After Minnie's death,artist Virginia Wright-Frierson designed and built the Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel at Airlie Gardens in her memory.
She was the subject of the documentary The Angel That Stands by Me:Minnie's Evans'Art in 1983.