The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new show, The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, offers audiences an opportunity to contemplate just how its subject may – or may not – have been an outsider to the art world, and to also revel in Evans’s increasing insiderness in the decades since her death in 1987. A comprehensive retrospective with nearly 100 pieces covering the entirety of Evans’s artistic output, the show occurs almost exactly 50 years after the Whitney first introduced the artist’s genius to New York’s art elite. Born in 1892, Evans created her first artwork in 1935, just a few days after the death of her grandmother, when she drew two claustrophobic pen and ink pieces that she fittingly titled My Very First and My Second. Made on scraps of paper, they are obsessive and maze-like, composed mainly of seemingly abstract jags and spirals, with closer inspection revealing what appear to be a few recognizable forms: a rainbow and sun, a field of crosses that may be a graveyard, and a canoe-like vessel containing three passengers. According to the Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, after dutifully signing and dating these pieces, Evans did not create so much as a single piece for another five years, until she had a chance encounter with these artworks as a sign that she should continue. “She painted all the time as a child, but then when she got married, she stopped making art,” said Haskell. “And then, in 1940, she took it up again.” From there, Evans would create with an inspired fervor, largely fitting art-making into quiet moments during her employment as a housekeeper at the estate of the financier Pembroke Jones, and then later as a gatekeeper at the estate’s Airlie Gardens. What propelled her forward was tantamount to a religious calling. #WomensArt #WomensCreativity https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/aug/21/minnie-evans-whitney-museum-outsider-artist?CMP=share_btn_url