Power of Pencil and Crayon: Meet Visionary Artist Minnie Evans

“Nobody in the world can teach me because they don’t know how to teach me. Nobody!

“My teacher? God has sent me teacher, angel sent me [teacher] and directed me what to do. I don’t know how I did it.

“We will be like the angels in heaven!”


Watching a short documentary on self-taught visionary artist, Minnie Evans— The Angel That Stand by Me, what still resonates to me is Minnie Evans’ constant laughter and her determined voice in proclaiming God’s power over her art-making. In her drawing, she depicted a world of mythical creatures and nature embedded with spiritual symbols. What amazes me is her tireless observation of Airlie Garden where she worked as a gatekeeper for twenty-seven years. She saw beyond the natural beauty to a utopia, or a heaven. Evans never forgot her ancestral trace in slavery from her great grandmother's grandmother who was enslaved from Trinidad to North Carolina.

I first learned about Evans’ art at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Co-founder, retired executive director of Intuit and my friend, Cleo Wilson, is a collector of Evans’ art. As I further explored Evans’ art, I found it had a much more profound meaning. I approached Cleo to find out why she chose Evans’ art for her collection and ways Evans’ art influenced her.

Ng-He: When was your first encounter of Minnie Evans’ art? 

Wilson: I don't really remember when I first encountered Minnie Evans’ work. It may
have been at Luise Ross Gallery in New York. I purchased a piece there 15 or 20 years ago. I had seen work by Sister Gertrude Morgan (another self-taught African-American artist) and I was drawn to the art created by women, specifically African American women. I wanted to add Minnie Evans to my collection.

Ng-He: What does Evans’ art speak to you?

Wilson: Minnie Evans art is full of hope and beauty, which speaks to me. It was created by a woman who lived in poverty and hardship, but was able to transcend her situation through the creation of art. It inspires me. Aside from being one of her best and largest works, the dates on the piece are 1946, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1967, show that she worked on it for 21 years. It shows that she was not satisfied with her first iteration of the work, but continued to improve on it by painting and collaging previous work to make a large beautiful work of art.

 

Minnie Evans, Untitled, 1967, (1946, 1958, 1960, 1962), Graphite, oil, waxed crayon and collage on canvas board, 

21 x 26 ½ inches, Collection Cleo F. Wilson, Photo by Cheri Eisenberg

Minne Evans’ persistence in art is inseparable with her religious belief and iron will of overcoming life hardships. Her art is relatively small but delicately layered with a great range of color. Spending days after days observing closely and being tirelessly curious about the beauty of the natural world. She once said, “Green is God’s theme color…600 and some shades of green.” Such level of attention to detail is mind-blowing.

For me, Minnie Evans’ art is a journey through her ancestral past, even as far as the birth of the earth. By the use of crayon, she expressed her passion for life, the good one and the bad one. Minnie Evans’ son once asked her how she felt about being famous. Evans simply replied, “I can’t realize it!” Modesty and resilience is what makes me love Evans’ art.

Kara Walker on My Mind

Image via Wikipedia

"Is that a razor blade she's holding?"

This was my observant friend's first reaction when I shared my current reading material.

This week, I resumed reading a book that's been leaving impressions on just about all interactions that I've had lately--from workplace conversations about regional cultural climates to quieter moments of reflection about racism.

Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw's, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, has considered Walker's evolution as an artist while distilling the painful reality of racism at the same time. Furthermore, it discusses the formation of a global dialogue that can stir complex feelings about one's own identity. Chapter 4, "Censorship and Reception," was especially considerate in relating Walker's powerful imagery. While reading, I learned that even fellow artists have questioned Walker's "appropriateness," which brings up an important question: who do we ultimately answer to as individual artists, and how does a sense of community foster that?

A New York Times article summed up her uncategorizable presence as an African-American artist in the art industry, by noting:

Race dominates everything, yet within it Ms. Walker finds a chaos of contradictory ideas and emotions. She is single-minded in seeing racism as a reality, but of many minds about exactly how that reality plays out in the present and the past.

African Women Fall Victim to a New Form of Slavery

Slavery is very much a part of today’s global economy. It rivals and in some regions eclipses the international drug trade. There are nearly twenty-seven million slaves worldwide, generating $1.3 billionin annual profits. Some estimates show a world slave population as high as two hundred million.

During previous eras where slavery was common, the new owner was given a deed or title to its newly acquired property similar to the receipt a cashier hands over to the customer whose recently purchased goods.

The kafeel system could be likened to that deed or title in that the labour sending countries agree to the relinquishing of their workers passports upon arrival in the destination country. The kafeel or kafala system is a sponsorship system that only allows expatriate workers to enter, work in, and leave certain countries with the permission of their sponsor or employers, who are locals to that country. It's common in countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where migrant domestic workers are common.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there are an estimated six million women working as maids in the Middle East. African countries like Ethiopia, Madagascar, Sudan as well as other various East and West African countries provide the bulk of household and cleaning services.

Languishing in Injustice

The main women’s prison in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli maintains a stagnant pool of migrant women many, who have spent more than a year awaiting the possibility of having their cases being brought before a judge. Few have access to institutional support from their embassies or consulates.

Waiting outside were two female Lebanese prison guards who were not exactly thrilled to see visitors.

“They have a gang ranking system in here and the Blacks are on the lowest level and the Filipinos are on the higher level,” says one Ethiopian detainee in her native language of Amharic. “The guards tell us to call our families so that they will send us money, which would make our time in jails easier.”

With tears in their eyes, the women press their hands against the glass barrier: physical contact with visitors is forbidden for inmates but this simple gesture signals their gratitude at the simple gifts of food, clothes, shampoo and feminine products brought to them by Yurda - a self-proclaimed social worker, community leader and domestic worker who has been in Lebanon for over eleven years – who has dedicated her free time to organizing donations.

Mixed in with criminals and murderers, many of these women were caught on the streets without papers after running away from their employers because of abuse, rape, starvation, forced confinement or accused of stealing.

“Female migrant workers are losing years off their lives by sitting in detention and one way of preventing this is by allowing the worker to keep their aqama (working papers) and original passport and let the employer retain the photocopy,” says Kenyan activist Naimeh Pelot.

Modern Day Slavery

Lacking legal protections, domestic workers are among the most exploited and abused workers in the world.

Rights advocates have long argued that exclusion from labour laws and recruitment-related abuses has left domestic workers in the Middle East vulnerable to exploitation, sexual abuse, forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and conditions akin to slavery.

However, a new ILO Convention on Domestic Workers adopted in June aims to ensure that these women are treated as human beings.

“When male migrant workers come to work in construction or other service and industry sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, they are protected under the labour law. Even if they don’t have full rights their work is recognized as work under the law, which is not the case for domestic workers,” said Simel Esim, Gender Specialist in the ILO's Regional Office for the Arab States in an interview.

“Jordan and Lebanon are the only countries where Ministries of Labour are in charge of a significant number of the institutional responsibilities regarding migrant domestic workers,” adds Esim.

“In the case of the GCC countries the oversight of domestic workers is under the jurisdiction of the Ministries of Interior instead of the Ministries of Labour, which leaves domestic workers outside the purview of the labour law. The emphasis on domestic workers is, therefore about their recognition as workers, with equal rights to workers in other sectors.”

The new convention requires governments to regulate private employment agencies that impose heavy debt burdens or misinform migrant domestic workers about their jobs, prohibit the practice of deducting domestic workers’ salaries to pay recruitment fees, investigate complaints and labour inspection in private homes.

Today recruitment agencies eager to cash in on this lucrative labour market lure these vulnerable women into debt bondage. Rights groups report that agency fees ranging from $200 to $400, must be paid before departure. However, for most women their first few salaries go toward repaying the debt.

“Policies relating to trafficking need to fall more in line with the reality of forced migration globally because most migrant workers are not the stereotypical sex worker chained to a bed,” Pardis Mahdavi, author of "Gridlock: Labour, Migration and Human Trafficking" said. “In fact they are men and women that are tied to metaphorical chains like debt and poverty that forces these workers to migrate and remain in poor working conditions.”