The Collection

Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, whose vividly colored paintings on cardboard, wood, and repurposed materials chronicled the rhythms of Black Southern rural life in the early twentieth century. Working from Melrose Plantation for most of her life, Hunter is remembered as a "memory painter," rendering cotton picking, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and quilting bees not from observation but entirely from recollection and imagination.

Born into a Louisiana Creole family near Cloutierville, Hunter left school after less than a year and never learned to read or write, beginning field labor by age eight. In 1902 her family moved to Melrose Plantation, where she spent decades as an agricultural worker and, later, as cook and housekeeper for Cammie Henry. Melrose evolved under Henry into a gathering place for visiting writers and artists, and it was there, using paint left behind by one such visitor in the late 1930s, that Hunter began to paint — although she maintained she had been creating images, quilts, and embroidered work long before that moment was recorded.

Hunter's paintings first sold for a dollar apiece at the local drugstore, with a hand-lettered sign outside her cabin inviting visitors in for a quarter to look. Recognition spread quickly from there: shows in Texas in 1945, a New Orleans exhibition in 1949, and a 1953 feature in Look magazine brought her national attention. In 1955 she became the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum, now the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her largest achievement, a series of nine narrative mural panels for Melrose's historic African House, was completed in 1955 when she was sixty-eight. Her style shifted over her long career — from muted, borrowed palettes to broader color and increasing abstraction brought on by arthritis in the 1950s and 60s — while her subject matter remained rooted in the world she knew.

By the end of her life, Hunter's paintings, once sold for pocket change, were held by major museums and collectors; she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986 and was named an honorary Louisiana colonel in 1987. Her work is now held in institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, cementing her legacy as one of the most celebrated self-taught artists in American history.