Doreen St. Félix’s weekend Critic’s Notebook opens with a man who buys a Minnie Evans drawing and returns it — he can’t get in. The show he walked away from, “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the Whitney (up through January), gathers nearly a hundred paintings and drawings by the self-taught visionary: dense, rainbow-bright botanical realms peopled by floating, expressionless, many-eyelashed heads.

What the piece lays out:

  • Evans was born in 1892 in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a mother of thirteen or fourteen; raised by her grandmother, she worked as a domestic servant and married at sixteen
  • Haunted since childhood by turbulent, pictorial dreams, she began drawing in 1935 after a voice told her to draw or die — “My Very First” is an elliptical solar-eye drawing on the back of a grocery list
  • In her late fifties she became gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens, selling crayon-and-pencil drawings at the gates until her legend outgrew North Carolina
  • Photographer Nina Howell Starr championed her; a 1975 Whitney exhibition made Evans the third Black woman with a solo show there — and drew fire from Black art-world critics who saw the “primitive” label, and her chalky-white Christs, as an insult to the tradition
  • She lived through the 1898 Wilmington massacre, the white-supremacist coup that seized her city, and — urged on by a psychic — painted “Invasion Picture,” her memento mori of the Normandy landings; she was a Black mother of sons sent to war

St. Félix refuses the easy frames: the condescension of the “innocent surrealist,” the stereotype of the egoless outsider artist. Evans was a spiritualist like Hilma af Klint and an automatist at once. Scholars reach for a Trinidadian ancestor named Monie, enslaved, whose memory may charge the blazing color, and for her late Fu Manchu-film obsession, which explains the uneasy faces that sometimes people the compositions — but none of it completes the math.

She is, to a degree, unknowable, and St. Félix leaves her that way. There comes a moment, looking at Evans’s dense worlds, when the eye stops decoding and the mind begins to surrender — the essay is an argument for staying in that moment instead of explaining it away.