Painting Dreams: Minnie Evans, Visionary Artist

by Mary E.  Lyons

Published by Houghton Mifflin, 1996

Ages 9 to adult

Minnie Evans always saw a world invisible to everyone else. As a child, her night dreams were filled with visions, and her days with sights and voices only she experienced. Her formal education ended after fifth grade. When she was 43 years old, Minnie Evans began recreating her dreams on scraps of paper, sometimes even on a window shade. After many years, the paintings of this long-time gate house attendant at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, came to the attention of folk art experts. Today Mrs. Evans' works can be seen in the folk art collections of leading art museums. Nineteen full-color reproductions of paintings with details about which readers can marvel are included in an engrossing brief account of the unschooled but never uninformed genius of Minnie Evans, who died at age 90 in 1982. (GMK; March 3)  © Cooperative Children's Book Center