Sitting within Wilmington’s Airlie Gardens is a vibrant, gleaming, and mystifying art installation that could captivate any visitor, even if they didn’t know its story.
They wouldn’t be alone. A survey courtesy of Rivers Art, a company providing fine-art prints, listed the Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel as one of the lesser-known landmarks that art lovers across the country would most want to visit.
The “Bottle Chapel,” ranked 14th in Rivers Art’s list of 126 “hidden gem” installations, was created in 2004 by Virginia Wright-Frierson and serves as a tribute to the late artist Minnie Evans, a Pender County native and longtime gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens who gained international recognition as a visionary artist…