“I tell my stories by making pictures… I paint the story of my people. The things that happened to me and the ones I know. My paintings tell how we worked, played, and prayed.”— Clementine Hunter, American folk artist

“I tell my stories by making pictures… I paint the story of my people. The things that happened to me and the ones I know. My paintings tell how we worked, played, and prayed.”

Many people figure that when they reach their late fifties, the party’s pretty much over. Your quirks and idiosyncrasies have hardened into permanent fixtures of your personality. Going to bed before 8 p.m. on a Friday night sounds like heaven. And at any given time, either you or someone very close to you will be actively training for some sort of mid-life-crisis battle of physical endurance: marathons, half-marathons, overly aggressive cycling, hikes across state lines, and whatever a “Red Bull Gym Clash” is.

But for Clementine Hunter, entering her mid-fifties unlocked a whole new part of herself that she’d never even considered could exist. During this magical decade, a swirl of destiny, opportunity, and God-given talent arrived on her doorstep. And before she knew it, everything began clicking into place. Things were just getting started for her, but Hunter never had a clue.

Life in the Jim Crow South

Born in the late 1880s, she had spent decades picking cotton under that hot Louisiana sun, raising children in a one-room cabin, and cooking and cleaning for the family who owned the plantation where she lived. Her grandmother had been enslaved. She’d never learned how to read or write. She went to school for a matter of days. At age eight, she joined her father in the fields and began picking cotton. Work was all Clementine Hunter knew.

Then, in her fifties, Hunter found a few tubes of paint and leftover brushes in the house she’d cleaned for decades, left behind by a visiting artist from New Orleans. By this point, she’d been married twice, raised a dozen children, and had become a grandmother. She’d never held a paintbrush in her life. But that night, working by the light of a kerosene lamp, Hunter pulled down a canvas window shade and started painting a river baptism she remembered seeing on the Cane River.

From then on, she never stopped. “God put those pictures in my head, and I put them on canvas, like he wants me to,” Hunter said once in an interview. “I used to pick up little pieces of board and all kinds of little pieces of paper,” she shared in another. “Painted on everything. I didn’t know if I was doing right or wrong, but I was painting. And I gave it all away. I liked what I was painting.”

By the time she died in 1988 at age 101, Hunter had become one of the country’s essential artists: a self-taught painter whose surreal, deeply personal scenes of the Jim Crow South also made her one of its important social and cultural historians.

And when the President of the United States invited her to the White House in the late 1970s, she had, very politely, said no thanks. She’d rather he come to her, replying: “If Jimmy Carter wants to see me, he knows where I am.”

A life measured in........

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