The photograph that introduced most people to Minnie Evans wasn't one of her vivid, dream-filled drawings. It was a portrait taken by Nina Howell Starr, a white art historian and photographer, showing Evans resting her arms on a windowsill at the botanical gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she worked. For decades, Evans's legacy has been filtered through Starr's lens—literally and figuratively.
Evans (1892–1987) was a self-taught artist who created extraordinary botanical vignettes bursting with spiritual and surrealist imagery, inspired by visions that had haunted her since childhood. Working as a gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens, she drew in bright Crayola colors, selling and gifting her work to visitors. By the early 1960s, she had built a local reputation. But her entry into the wider art world came through Starr, a white woman with credentials and connections.
In 1962, Starr, then a graduate student in Florida, traveled to North Carolina to meet Evans and began recording interviews with her. What followed was a carefully orchestrated rise: Starr became Evans's dealer, secured her a breakout New York exhibition, curated a Whitney show in 1975, and eventually became executor of her estate. Without Starr's advocacy, Evans's work might never have reached major museums. And yet the relationship raises uncomfortable questions that museums are only now beginning to ask.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxThe weight of gatekeeping
Starr controlled what scholars could access—which photographs, which recordings, which documents shaped how the world understood Evans's life and art. A Black woman artist's narrative was mediated through a white woman with institutional power. The relationship between them unfolded against a backdrop of race and class that neither woman could escape, even if they wanted to. We don't know how much Evans shaped her own story, or whether cooperation came from business sense or something closer to necessity.
The questions feel urgent now because Evans isn't alone. William Edmondson, another self-taught Black artist from the South, was similarly "discovered" and championed by white photographers and curators. Both artists had their work circulated through networks they didn't control, their narratives filtered through gatekeepers who, however well-intentioned, held the power to decide what the world would see.
Museums revisiting Evans's legacy are asking a harder question: Have the power dynamics between Southern Black self-taught artists and white Northern institutions actually shifted, or have they just become quieter. The work itself—Evans's vivid, visionary drawings—deserves to be encountered on its own terms, without the frame of who discovered whom or who decided the story was worth telling.
