Clementine Hunter recalled the important role older African American women played on plantations in her strong and striking painting "Black Matriarch,” circa 1970s.
:America's great tradition of self-taught art is comprehensively documented at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. The museum has played a key role in promoting appreciation for all untutored artists, particularly since the 1980s for African American painters, sculptors and craftsmen.
Currently on national tour is a selection of some of the museum's treasures in "Ancestry and Innovation: African American Art from the American Folk Art Museum," on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art through October 11. The wide-ranging exhibition of some 40 works in various media explores the artistic expressions of self-trained black artists from the rural South and the urban North. Interspersed with compelling, colorful quilts, the paintings and sculptures celebrate the continuing contributions of African Americans to the nation's cultural and visual experience.
"Ancestry and Innovation"
is organized by the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
Among the untutored black artists working in the Twentieth Century, the eternally charming, evocative work of Clementine Hunter (1887–1988) of Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches, La., stands out. In her long life, Hunter transformed the work and rituals of her small Louisiana community on the Cane River into concise, animated paintings.
Often dubbed the black or Southern Grandma Moses, Clementine Hunter evoked the pastime of card games at Louisiana's Melrose Plantation in this 18-by-24-inch painting, "Playing Cards,” circa 1970.
A prolific artist, Hunter created several thousand works during a four-decade career at Melrose Plantation that started when she began laboring in the fields in her midteens. Along the way, she had seven children and excelled at making clothes, quilts and baskets. Promoted later to domestic helper in the Big House, Hunter benefited from the fact that the owners of the plantation were patrons of the arts and hosted numerous artists and writers, said to include Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Alexander Wolcott and silversmith William Spratling. Encouraged by several of these artists-in-residence, around 1940 Hunter began to produce memory paintings documenting the plantation experience. Using tubes of paint left behind by a visiting artist, she created her first painting on a discarded window shade.
Typically, her oils have a strip of brown or green at the base to suggest the ground, and a swath of blue, gray and white at the top, implying the sky. In between, Hunter placed figures engaged in everyday activities of the plantation.
Her playful sense of place, combined with vibrant color combinations and bold brushstrokes, bring to life such scenes as "Fishing," circa 1968, and "Playing Cards," circa 1970. By contrast, "Black Matriarch," circa 1970s, is a strong, featureless, respectful homage to black women who played such central roles on plantations. Among other scenes of vanishing plantation life: picking cotton, gathering pecans, washing clothes, weddings, baptisms and funeral scenes. She often painted on cardboard boxes, jugs, bottles and gourds.
