Colton Klein, PhD Student in History of Art and Whitney Fellow in the Environmental Humanities, has published ”The Turpentine State: Minnie Evans and North Carolina Ecologies” in American Art 38(1).
Abstract: North Carolina artist Minnie Evans is well-known for the symmetrical, abstracted floral drawings that she produced from 1930 until her death in 1987. Less well known are her naturalistic compositions of identifiable locations around Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived. Evans’s choice of local spaces, notable for welcoming Black residents during the Jim Crow era, reminds us of the real issues of access and segregation that she faced as a Black woman in twentieth-century North Carolina. Evans’s images, especially Airlie Oak (1954), recall the histories of enslavement, violence, and refuge in Wilmington’s surrounding forests, particularly those associated with the city’s thriving nineteenth-century turpentine industry and its 1898 White supremacist coup.