The Talented Evans-Tibbs'

Note: This blog post was intended for Black History Month, but due to unforeseen circumstances was delayed a couple of weeks).

On my Harlem Renaissance in DC tour, there is a stop at 1910 Vermont Avenue NW. It's a typical two-story townhouse fronted by a little garden and wrought iron entryway that has flowering vines in the spring and summer. On the house is a plaque that notes the building is on the historical registry, but no information as to why. I'm surprised that there hasn't yet been an informational sign placed on the gate, like that placed in front of Duke Ellington's former home. The family that lived in 1910 Vermont Avenue over four generations may not be quite as famous as the greatest jazz composer there ever was, but as far as Washingtonians go, they were a very important family indeed. This post focuses on two of them, separated by one generation, Lillian Evanti, and Thurlow Evans-Tibbs. The former was one of the great lyrical sopranos of the early 20th century, the latter a prolific collector of African American art who would leave the city with legacy.

Madame Lillian Evanti was a trailblazer for black women in the classical music realm. She was a contemporary of the great Marian Anderson, though the latter’s bout with the Daughters of the American Revolution, and resulting grand performance at the Lincoln Memorial, would make her the more well-known of the two. Lilian was born in DC, and for the most part grew up at 1910 Vermont Avenue NW. She showed promise as a singer very early in life, performing at church gatherings and community events. She attended Howard University and graduated in 1917 with a degree in classical music, but she had difficulty finding a position with an American tour company due to racial views in Jim Crow America. She married Robert Tibbs, the Director of the music program at Howard, and contracted her maiden name (Evans) and married name (Tibbs) to create the more continental sounding performance name Lillian "Evanti.” I read in a 2019 Washington Post article that the idea was in fact that of her friend, Crisis editor and local DC mentor Jessie Redmon Fauset.

In 1924 she traveled to France, where she was hired by the Paris Opera Company, the first African-American woman to be hired by any European opera company. She spoke several languages and translated opera lyrics into English. She experienced incredible success, with several American newspapers covering her triumphs. The first newspaper in which she appears is The Washington Herald, in 1925. In an article titled “Local Musicians Making Plans for Future,” they wrote, “Mme Lillian Evanti, colored coloratura soprano, who will sail Wednesday to begin her three years’ contract with hte (sic) Paris Opera Company, will be heard in a song recital Tuesday evening in the Lincoln Theater. She made her debut in “Lakme” with the Paris company in Nice last spring, and made an overwhelming success.” She returned to the U.S. on and off to perform around the country, including Wichita, Rochester, and of course her home town of Washington, DC.

Lillian would eventually return to the United States for good, and in 1941 collaborated with Mary Cardwell Dawson in Pittsburgh to form the National Negro Opera Company. The company became the most well-known black-run opera company in America, and would open doors for black opera singers throughout the country, including La Julia Rhea, Dawson and Evanti themselves, and composer Clarence Cameron White. She also traveled to other parts of the world as an American representative. President Truman appointed her as a Good Will Ambassador to Latin America. While her marriage didn’t survive her success, her legacy was to create a space for black opera performers at a time when they were often kept out of the limelight. She turned her childhood home, which she took over after her parents passed away, into a gathering place for black intellectual circles. This included her talented grandson, Thurlow Evans-Tibbs, Jr., whose upbringing included no small amount of influence by his glamorous grandmother.

Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. was born in DC in 1952. His talent for languages was remarkable enough to deserve a mention in the Afro-American paper in 1954: “Cute Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. is smart, my, my. He is only 28 months old and he already says ‘Thank you very much’ in French and “Pat a cake, Pat a cake” in Spanish!” They also reference his grandmother, Lillian Evanti, with whom he reads law books. (Dec. 13th 1954, pg. 13). He graduated from Cordozo High School, got his Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth, and Master's degree in Urban Planning from Harvard. He worked at the General Services Agency (GSA), but explored a side gig collecting art. He had a solid start with his grandmother’s collection, which included pieces from her travels around the world. Starting in 1978, he began holding exhibitions at his grandmother’s home, where he himself then lived. He got into art dealing, appraisal, and, of course, organizing exhibitions.

That same year, Thurlow Evans-Tibbs Jr. left GSA and turned his life over entirely to maintaining and exhibiting the art collection, which documents and includes art spanning the years 1810 - 1997. Over a couple of decades, he added between 600 – 700 pieces, primarily focusing on art by black artists. His dream was to promote them and have them recognized alongside their white contemporaries. In 1989, the Afro-American Cultural Center in Charlotte, South Carolina, exhibited selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection. That may have been his first exhibition outside of Washington. At least it was the first one that I found documented in the media. The article in the Charlotte Observer, which covered the opening of the exhibit, references Lillian Evanti’s legacy and how she used her home as a gallery and a gathering place for black elites, including illustrious visitors such as Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, W.E.B de Bois, and Langston Hughes.

In 1996, after suffering from poor health, and perhaps foreseeing his own end in the near future, he bequeathed his archive and thirty-three works of art to the Corcoran Gallery. The collection included works by Betye Saar, Henry O. Tanner, and Alma Thomas, a DC-based artist whose work "Resurrection" adorned the White House during the Obama administration. The collection was the largest bequest of African American art to the Gallery in almost 50 years. After the Corcoran folded in 2015, the entire collection was absorbed by the National Gallery of Art, where it remains to this day.

As far as Thurlow’s personal life, there is an insightful article published in the Washington Post on April 19th, 1997, titled “The Legacy,” by Paul Hendrickson. It’s a poignant examination of Evans-Tibbs as a human being, both the good and the bad. He was known for not being the most financially responsible person, sometimes allowing financial obligations to go unfulfilled. He was obscure, hard to get ahold of occasionally, and his death was brought on by the recreational use of toxic inhalants. He was gay, a regular subject in publications such as TheMailbox!, whose audience was the black gay community, and The Washington Blade. According to Hendrickson's article, "In his younger days, he would lead expeditions to Pier 9, a Southwest Washington gay bar, where he would often pick up the tab." He also had a sister, Diane Tibbs-Islam, with whom he was not close. She didn't even attend his funeral. The article goes on to discuss his journey as an art collector, hell-bent on highlighting African American contributions. I encourage you to read the entire article. It paints a portrait of a man who was just utterly human, raised to be culturally aware, confident in himself, but prone to all the foibles of the creative mind hungry for experience.

Artists, and the people who collect their works, tend to be complicated, sometimes opaque individuals, and Thurlow was no different. Nonetheless, his contributions to the DC, and national, art world are indisputable. He inherited much in the way of cultural consciousness from his talented Grandmother, Lilian Evanti, who herself was raised with a sense of purpose by her parents. The Evans-Tibbs family, from within that unassuming Washington townhome, stitched a powerful square in the quilt of DC's cultural landscape.