Few histories of art are as fraught in their ethics, context, and patronage as those of self-taught and vernacular artists of color. Clementine Hunter (1886-1988), a painter active during the latter half of the 20 th - century whose work garnered national renown and media attention through the efforts of the white men and women who “discovered” her, is a paradigmatic example of an artist whose abundant talents were simultaneously nurtured and exploited by so-called benefactors. Born in either 1886 or 1887 to sharecropper parents, Hunter was a Creole woman of color who spent the entirety of her life working on plantations in central Louisiana.1 Baptized Catholic as an infant and educated briefly in segregated schools, Hunter never learned to read or write, a fact that rarely escaped emphasis by her biographers and promoters. By the time she was eight, she had begun working in cotton fields alongside her parents, and in 1902, Hunter’s family relocated from Hidden Hill Plantation to Melrose Plantation, where she would spend the rest of her life. After her first partner died in 1914, she married Emmanuel Hunter, who taught her to speak English in addition to her native Creole French, a rarely discussed turning point that likely determined the rest of her life.2

Melrose Plantation became an artists’ colony in the 1920s. By that point, Hunter working as a servant, performing cooking, sewing, and cleaning work for the owner of the plantation, Cammie Henry. Francois Mignon, whose given name was Frank VerNooy Mineah and who would become the Melrose’s long-time curator, arrived at the Plantation from New York City in 1939. The same year, Hunter reportedly began using discarded paint tubes left by a visiting artist to create still lifes and depictions of her life and that of other workers at Melrose.3 In keeping with the 1920s and 30s vogue for folk art stoked by New York curators such as Holger Cahill, Mignon took an interest in Hunter’s work. He was soon joined by James Register, a visiting writer who began sending Hunter art supplies from Oklahoma, where he was based. Both men fabricated numerous aspects about their own backgrounds and took similarly wide liberties with the truth regarding Hunters’ biographical details, including forging the signature on her early works.4 As Hunter’s de facto agents, Mignon and Register strove to influence her work in addition to promoting it to regional—and eventually, national—venues and publications. In the early 1960s, Register attempted to drive Hunter toward non-objective painting, which she created for over a year under his direction in spite of her stated aversion to the style.5 When their application for a Rosenwald Fellowship for Hunter was denied, the men nevertheless pitched the consolatory $200 dollar reward as a Rosenwald Grant. Hunter never received the money, which was used in part to transport her work from Oklahoma to Louisiana.6 At one of the first public exhibitions of her paintings at Northwestern State University (which eventually awarded her an honorary doctorate), Mignon helped to arrange for Hunter to view her work at the gallery on a day it was closed in order to bypass the University’s rules against admitting Black visitors.7 When Hunter died at age 101 in 1988, she was a nationally recognized artist, yet still living in the trailer home she purchased with the proceeds of her work. The artist saw almost nothing of the thousands of dollars that were earned by collectors, dealers, and patrons of her work.

Terms such as “folk,” “self-taught,” “outsider,” and “vernacular” have been used throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to describe the work of artists and craftspeople who have operated outside of mainstream systems of galleries and museums. The terms are often used interchangeably, though folk art sometimes specifically refers to work produced within established cultural traditions that are community-based and typically passed down from one generation to another. Writing in response to the Black Folk Art in America exhibition at the Corcoran Museum of Art in 1983, Eugene Metcalf noted that the newly growing interest in vernacular art by Black artists relied on the same critical methodology as was used by Holger Cahill in the 1930s. Basing his critique on the community-centered understanding of folk art, Metcalf further notes that many of the artists in the exhibition were creating work based on deeply personal visions—rather than traditions preserved from one generation to the next—and so could not be considered folk artists. Semantics aside, Metcalf points out that by removing artists’ work from its communal context, art created outside the mainstream art world was made “exciting and invigorating…but it could never be evidence of significant cultural sophistication or attainment.”8 Throughout the 20th century this attitude toward the work of self-taught artists “helped establish aesthetic definitions that allowed socially powerful groups to appear to support a new and more democratic version of American art and society while actually protecting and even augmenting [the] exclusive social interests” of white promoters.9 In the case of Clementine Hunter, the disregard for context, save for the blunt biographical details of her life on Melrose Plantation, is particularly stark. As reviewers of her 2012 biography by Art Shriver and Tom Whitehead have noted, outside of the hagiographic treatments of Hunter—and, to a degree, of Mignon and Register—we know little about the artist herself except through the lens of the white men and women who benefited from her artwork.10 Reviewer Marianne Richardson writes, “a multidimensional portrait of the artist through the eyes and voices of family, descendants of neighbors, church folk, and others…who really knew and cared about her and did not look at her and see only dollar signs” remains to be written, as does a thorough analysis of the ways in which her paintings fit into the wider material and visual culture of Louisiana.11

As numerous critics of her work have pointed out, the best testament to the artist remains the extraordinary visual record of thousands of paintings which Hunter executed over the course of forty years. Throughout this time, she produced detailed scenes of plantation life that were the daily reality for her, her family, and her community, including extensive depictions of cotton picking, pecan harvests, and wash days, as well as events such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Her works also included numerous still lives, particularly of flowers, and Biblical images, such as Nativity, c. 1970. The artist returned to this motif on many occasions, each time inserting biographical and personal references in the depicted scene. In this crisply painted rendition, Mary and Jesus (sporting waist-length hair) watch as three men in contemporary dress bring packages to a red house as angels hover above them against a grey sky. Above them, angels hover beneath a gray sky. Per Hunter’s recorded comments on a similar work, the three men carry a gourd, a cake, and a present in lieu of the traditional gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Centered in the heart of the composition, the red building, which represents the home of Jesus and Mary, strongly resembles Hunter’s depictions of cotton storage sheds in other works. This is particularly notable in the white marks surrounding and beneath the door, which are executed in the same impasto Hunter typically used to depict cotton. The placement of the building in the painting and its connection to the cotton industry alludes to the significance of the latter to Hunter, who once remarked that she found picking cotton easier than painting. The interplay of religious imagery and subtle personal references in Nativity Scene speaks to a rich symbolic language that Hunter used to record her thoughts, dreams, and memories. Her expansive oeuvre remains an open invitation for scholars to ground the study of her work in our growing understanding of the complicated visual and material culture of the American Gulf South.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo