Biography: A painter from the Cane River area of Louisiana, Clementine Hunter has given the world a unique record of Black plantation life in the South. Although Mrs. Hunter was unable to read or write, her paintings of weddings, funerals, cotton-picking, pecan harvests, and washdays stand as witness to a rural culture which is vanishing from the American landscape. Born into a Creole family on a plantation in Louisiana, she was sent to a Catholic school, but soon left to pick cotton and work in the fields. As a young girl she moved to Melrose Plantation and after many years of working outside, was brought into the "Big House" to serve as a maid and cook. In the early 1940s she began experimenting with some paints and brushes left at the house by an artist from New Orleans. Painting on anything she could find--cardboard, paper bags, and sometimes canvasses--Mrs. Hunter soon caught the attention of artists visiting the plantation. Her first public showing in Louisiana was at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Gallery in 1949. Her paintings have been exhibited in many museums and galleries, including the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Anderson-Hopkins Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1979 the Division of Arts of the state of Louisiana commissioned a painting depicting life on a plantation at harvest time. "Louisiana Harvest" now hangs in the state capitol building in Baton Rouge.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick

Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Collection: Black Women Oral History Project

Research Guide: guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp