Clementine Hunter, a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, was born in late December 1886 or early January 1887. She lived and worked on Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches. She is one of the best-known American folk artists. Her work is displayed at the Smithsonian Institute and recently exhibited in the Louvre in Paris.
She was born into a Louisiana Creole family at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville in Natchitoches Parish. She started working as a farm laborer when young and never learned to read or write. In her fifties, she began to sell her paintings, which soon gained local and national attention for their complexity in depicting Black Southern life in the early 20th century.
Initially, she sold her first paintings for as little as 25 cents. But by the end of her life, her work was being exhibited in museums and sold by dealers for thousands of dollars. Clementine Hunter produced an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 paintings in her lifetime.
Hunter was granted an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986, and she is the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the present-day New Orleans Museum of Art.
Hunter has become one of the most well-known self-taught artists. She is described as a memory painter.
Her most famous work is of brightly colored depictions of important events like funerals, baptisms, weddings, and scenes of plantation labor like picking cotton or pecans and domestic labor. However, Hunter’s paintings vary in subject and style, including many abstract paintings and still-life paintings of zinnias.
At Melrose Plantation, many of her paintings are displayed, including a room-sized mural. Her work also can be viewed at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and Northwest Louisiana History Museum in downtown Natchitoches.
She passed away on January 1, 1988, at 101 years old.
For more information about Melrose Plantation, click here. For more information about visiting nearby Natchitoches, click here.
Thank you so much for bringing attention to Clementine Hunter for those of us who hadn’t known of her. It is, sadly, not amazing that she is so little-known while her near-contemporary, ‘Grandma’ Moses became a national icon.