Clementine Hunter

Clementine Hunter (late 1886 or early 1887-1988)

Hunter was born near New Orleans and lived for most of her 102 years on Melrose Plantation, which became an artists’ haven in the early twentieth century. An uneducated field worker and maid who first painted in her fifties, she earned the nickname “the black Grandma Moses.” She eventually made more than 4,000 works, painting and piecing images of her world—landscapes, religious scenes, and vignettes of everyday life—in bright colors on various surfaces, including cardboard, lumber, and bottles.

Important Source Material:

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, pp. 110-111.

Moses, Jennifer. “Looking for Clementine Hunter’s Louisiana.” The New York Times. June 14, 2013.

Trechsel, Gail Andrews. “Clementine Hunter.” Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yelen. Gail Andrews Trechsel, ed. Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Museum of Art; distributed by University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

AM