The Intellectual Versatility of Our Greatest Collector

Phillis Wheatley, Augusta Savage, Malcolm X

Nineteenth-century African American paintings. Autographed books. Rare coins. Scrapbooks. Letters from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner. Letters written by Malcolm X while incarcerated. Correspondence from Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence to friends and colleagues. Sculptures. Rare stamps. A suitcase bearing the initials "G. E. J.," once owned by Grace Elizabeth Nail Johnson, the wife of James Weldon Johnson. Collector Walter O. Evans has it all.

Initially, after receiving a guided tour of his massive collections, my impression was that Evans stands as our greatest collector of African American art, books, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts. I still believe that. What I had not been able to fully articulate until recently, however, was the remarkable intellectual versatility that accounts for his ability to assemble such an expansive and interconnected collection.

He could have devoted himself exclusively to paintings. He could have made rare books his singular focus. He could have concentrated on manuscripts or correspondence. Instead, by continually pursuing what he calls "the Black experience," Evans was inspired to collect across categories and to recognize meaningful relationships among seemingly disparate objects.

He learned early on to value association copies. He sought artifacts that connected important people to one another: a book inscribed by one renowned figure to another; a work of art created by a celebrated sculptor for a distinguished painter; letters that documented intellectual and artistic networks. Augusta Savage, for example, sculpted a bust of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, the wife of Jacob Lawrence. Evans owned two casts of the bust—one that he kept in his home and another that he donated to the Telfair Museums.

From the late 1970s through the 1990s, while working as a surgeon in Detroit and simultaneously building this extraordinary collection, Evans was effectively pursuing an independent curriculum in African American visual art, literary history, collecting practices, and Black social history. Each acquisition expanded not only his holdings but also his understanding of the relationships among artists, writers, activists, institutions, and communities. The collection became an intellectual map of the Black experience, a trove of cultural artifacts. 

In the process of building this extraordinary collection was a nimble mind, a wide-ranging reader, and an outgoing communicator. The quality that united those traits, and ultimately made the collection possible, was intellectual versatility.