![]() ![]() So, the next time you get the urge to make a painting, ask a trusted adult if there is anything you can paint on besides paper or a canvas!Ĭlementine Hunter didn’t start painting until she was in her 50s. Robert Wilson wrote an opera in her honor. Many articles and books feature Hunter and her work. Northwestern State University in Louisiana gave her an honorary fine arts degree. Her best-known works are murals painted on the walls of the African House on the Melrose plantation. President Carter invited her to visit the White House. Along with her paintings, Hunter created quilts and some fabric art.Īlthough she started working with no formal art training, her work gained universal respect. Almost all her figures were of Black women. She also showed occasions like baptisms, funerals, and weddings. Hunter’s paintings featured the everyday life of plantation workers. At an auction in the 2000s, one of Hunter’s paintings sold for close to $70,000! Her first sales were less than a dollar per painting. Her primitive art gained the attention of people who visited Melrose. Hunter, who could not read or write, told stories about those people who made the plantations run. She used her work to show what it was like to be a Black woman living on a plantation. Of course, she also worked on traditional canvases and papers.Ĭlementine Hunter created thousands of paintings during her career. She created on gourds, bottles, pieces of wood, and even plastic milk jugs. In the years that followed, Hunter used many surfaces for her paintings. With a set of someone else’s used paints, she used a window shade to create her first work of art. She began painting when she was in her 50s. Hunter spent most of her life at Melrose. She moved to housework and wound up as a cook. Hunter started working alongside her parents as sharecroppers. Owners who took it over later turned it into an artists’ colony. When she was a youth, her family moved to the Melrose plantation, also in Louisiana. She never got more than a few days of formal schooling in her life. Her parents were Creole, and her grandparents had been enslaved people. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was possibly based on Hidden Hill. People knew Hidden Hill plantation in Louisiana for its brutal treatment of its enslaved people and servants. She was born Clementine Reuben at Hidden Hill in January 1887. Let’s study the life and career of Clementine Hunter! That’s how the artist we will discuss today got her start. Her work can be seen in the Smithsonian Institute, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, the High Museum of Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the New York Historical Association, the Oprah Winfrey Collection in Chicago and many other museums and private collections across the country.Have you ever wanted to make a painting? Just pull out some paints and some paper or a canvas and start something beautiful? If you had nothing to paint on, you might try looking around for a blank surface. She presented Melrose resident Francois Mignon with a painting of a Cane River baptism on a window shade, and her life changed forever.Ĭlementine Hunter is Louisiana’s most famous female artist, and she is one of the most important folk artists of all time. Clementine, who had at this time turned from work in the cotton fields to work in the kitchen as the cook at Melrose, found the paints and brushes and asked permission to paint a picture of her own. During Clementine’s days there, it had become a small artist colony, where Louisiana writers and artists like Alberta Kinsey, Caroline Dorman, and Harnett Kane spent time with others such as William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.Īs the story goes, New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left some paints and brushes behind on one of her visits to Melrose in about 1940. The plantation and its family were a focal point of the African and Creole cultures along the Cane River. Melrose was a cotton plantation founded in the 1790’s by the freed Congo woman, Marie Therese and her son Augustin Metoyer. Clementine lived at Melrose for most of the rest of life, moving just right down the road a few years before she died on January 1, 1988, at the age of 101. When she was a young girl, her father moved the family away from the harsh environment at Hidden Hill (the plantation that was supposedly the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to the more hospitable Melrose Plantation. Clementine Hunter was born on Hidden Hill Plantation (now called Little Eva Plantation) near Natchitoches, Louisiana, in December of 1886. ![]()
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