Evans led a deeply spiritual life as a member of the St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church and a close reader of the Bible. She was especially drawn to the final book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, which describes Christ's return and the establishment of his eternal kingdom on earth. Inspired by her study of scripture, Evans filled much of her art with images of Christ and angels, who appear throughout the book of Revelation as divine messengers. Evans once described "the angel that stands by me" as directing her artistic efforts.
Untitled (Day to Night with Beasts and Angels), 1966
Evans called her works that feature both the night sky and the transitioning sun her "day to night" pictures. Because her dreams occurred during both sleeping and waking hours, her vision sometimes disoriented her sense of time. During one dream that seemed to begin in the morning but included the darkening sky, she remembered exclaiming, "What is this, is this the sun eclipse?"
This drawing is characteristic of a new mode Evans began working in by the 1960s, using decorative curves to frame scenes by white angels who stand guard over a central form resembling an altar. Here the central form consists of images Evans had been developing for decades—long pine tree backgrounds, winged beasts, mandalas, and cryptic writing. That she titled this work Modern Art suggests her confidence in its status as an exemplar of twentieth-century art. In 1975, when the Whitney mounted Evans's first one-person museum exhibition in New York, this work was featured on the cover of the exhibition brochure.
Evans's interest in ancient history may have inspired her to include images of temples and walled villages in her work. This painting is unusual in its reference to a specific site—the Hindu temple known as Temple in the Sea, which was built in 1952 in Trinidad, the Caribbean island that was home to Evans's maternal ancestors. Her depiction of the temple in a coastal setting similar to that of Wilmington suggests Evans's desire to link her own history with that of her forebears.
In the book of Revelation, St. John the Apostle's prophetic visions are filled with cryptic symbols of strange, hybrid beasts and monsters with multiple heads and snakes for tails. The placement of the creatures on a beach reflects the setting of the book of Revelation, which unfolds between sea and land. Evans's own coastal environment, as well as the kinship she may have felt with St. John the Apostle—who also communicated his visions—may have contributed to her identification with that book of the New Testament.
As Evans's career evolved, angels came to dominate her compositions. She depicted them as intermediaries between the divine and human realms, unleashing their judgments through trumpets. The abundance of blond angels that emerged in her work in the 1960s fed the perception that Evans favored white people in her art, a critique that was especially powerful in the context of the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement. Evans insisted that the angels' white wings, robes, and skin were based on her spiritual visions of heaven rather than on racial distinctions.
.90%20Evans.jpg)
