The Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) is pleased to announce the opening of the Walter O. Evans Collection of African-American Art on August 15, 1998. The Collection is one of the world’s finest privately owned collections of its kind and numbers over 1000 pieces, eighty-three of which will be on display through October 25, 1998 at WAMA. Paintings, sculptures,  and photographs by some of the most important nineteenth and twentieth century African-American artists chronicle the development of art in the U.S. This exhibition will present many of these pivotal artists to Mississippi audiences for the first time. Chevron Pascagoula Refinery and Merchants & Marine Bank are the Exhibition Sponsors.  

Dr. Walter O. Evans of Detroit, Michigan began collecting seriously in the mid-1970s. As a young physician, he had definite criteria in mind. "I decided that every piece of art I would buy henceforth, would have a black person in it. That was in the beginning," he explains. "What moved me was that in all my visits to the museums of the world, I almost never saw any art by African-Americans. If there were any, they didn’t have any black figures in
the paintings."

From that early decision grew a broader consensus on acquiring work for the Collection. "I have evolved from the period where I had to see a black image in the work," says Evans. "I was being very narrow-minded. Most of the black artists of the nineteenth century painted in the tradition of the mainstream. Landscape painting was reflective of America’s expansion and the artist’s reverence of nature. This period is now a central part of what I collect. It was part of my ‘growing up.’"