Sale 2528 - African-American Fine Art, January 30, 2020

29 c CLEMENTINE HUNTER (1886 - 1988) Untitled (Leaving Church Sunday) . Oil on canvas board, circa 1970. 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Initialed in oil, lower right. Provenance: the Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago. Famed Louisiana self-taught artist, Clementine Hunter was born on the Hidden Hill Plantation in rural Louisiana where her grandparents had been slaves. When she was twelve, her family moved to Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish to work as sharecroppers. Clementine worked as a field hand, cook, and housekeeper. Melrose Plantation became a retreat for visiting artists. Hunter took up painting with an artist’s left-behind paint and brushes in her fifties. She painted everyday images of the activities of the black families and workers, and made pictorial quilts. A 1953 article in Look magazine drew her national attention. Three years later, the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) organized a solo exhibition for Hunter, the first for an African-American artist by a Louisiana museum - even though the segregation laws at the time prohibited Hunter from entering the exhibition space during public viewing hours. Radcliffe College included Hunter in its Black Women Oral History Project, published in 1980. Northwestern State University of Louisiana granted her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1986. Her artworks are found in many public including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, New York and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Hunter has been the subject of biographies and artist studies, and inspired other works of art. In 2013, composer Robert Wilson presented a new opera about her Zinnias: the Life of Clementine Hunter at Montclair State University in New Jersey. [3,000/5,000]