The artistic versatility of Michael Kelly Williams, whose works are on display at the Kenkeleba Gallery until November 2, brought to mind memories of Clementine Hunter, the folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana who worked on Melrose Plantation. Like Williams, Hunter was proficient in several formats, most famously as a painter, although she was equally adept at spinning cotton and making quilts.
Hunter was born in late December in 1886 or 1887 into a Creole family at Hidden Hill Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, La. She was the first of seven children born to Janvier Reuben and Mary Antoinette Adams. Her parents were married on Oct. 15, 1890, in Cloutierville at the town’s Catholic Church, St. John the Baptist. After her baptism in 1887, her family called her Tebe, for “Little Baby,” and she kept the name into her adult years.
She attended a segregated school for less than a year and thus never learned to read or write. At eight years of age, she was picking cotton along with her father. At the age of 15, she moved to Melrose Plantation, where she worked as a farm laborer. In 1907, she gave birth to her first child, Joseph Dupree, whose father was Charles Dupree, a Creole man 15 years older than Hunter. The couple never married and he died seven years later.
In 1924, she married Emmanuel Hunter, a man six years her senior. He taught her English and they had five children (two of whom were stillborn) while living in a workers’ cabin on Melrose Plantation. During this period, Hunter began working as a cook and housekeeper for Cammie Henry, the wife of John H. Henry. Her versatility was evident in her sewing of clothes, making dolls, and tending the family’s vegetable garden. Eventually, Cammie Henry began hosting a salon for artists and writers, and their appearance there may have been an inspiration for Hunter’s desire to paint, which she began doing in the late 1930s, using the discarded tubes of paint left by the visiting artists.
Hunter’s husband became terminally ill and bedridden 10 years later, leaving her as the sole breadwinner and caregiver for him, and painting late at night. He died in 1944. Along with own children, she adopted Mary Francis LaCour, who had been abandoned at age 11 by her parents. Hunter taught her LaCour paint and they often displayed their works outside their home.
Hunter began selling her paintings for 25 cents each. Her first exhibit was in 1945 in Rosenwald Grant, Brownwood, and Waco, Tex. Four years later, she had a show at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts, where she acquired recognition beyond Cane River. She received national exposure when Look magazine published an article about her work in 1953.
Hunter was soon recognized as one of the best-known self-taught artists. She often said that she painted from memory in documenting her southern environment. Among her most popular works were depictions of events in her community, various ceremonies, and scenes of plantation life. “I just get it in my mind and I just go ahead and paint, but I can’t look at nothing and paint. No trees, no nothing. I just make my own tree in my mind—that’s the way I paint.”
After the onset of arthritis, she was encouraged to delve more into abstract work, and an example of that was “Clementine Makes a Quilt.” However, two years later, in 1964, she returned to her forte in narrative works when she began devoting more time to her quilts—something she had developed long before her immersion in painting. Her quilts and tapestries, in many respects, were an extension of her paintings, and many of them were not batted (backed), indicating they were created to hang as tapestries and not used as a household function.
The honors and awards she received were numerous, including being noted as the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum, now the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 1985, she was saluted during a centennial tribute to her. Later, she received an invitation from President Jimmy Carter and a letter from President Ronald Reagan. She was included in the Black Women Oral History Project records that are housed at Harvard University. In 1987, Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards designated her as an honorary colonel, a state senator, and aide-de-camp.
Hunter’s remarkable achievements also spawned a number of forgeries that readers and reviewers can find in several biographies and profiles on her life and legacy. She was 101 when she died on January 1, 1988, in Natchitoches parish.