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My Great-Great Grandmother Was a Famous Outsider Artist. Let’s Explore the “isms” Attached to This Exclusionary Term.
“I just get it in my mind and I just go ahead and paint but I can’t look at nothing and paint. No trees, no nothing. I just make my own tree in my mind, that’s the way I paint.”
These were the words of my great-great grandmother, Clementine Hunter, a woman noted as one of the most important folk artists of her time. Born to a Creole family in the Cane River region of Natchitoches near Cloutierville, Louisiana, she spent most of her life on Melrose Plantation, now a National Historic Landmark.
On the brink of adolescence, overt racism turned Clementine away from school, but her ability to paint stories depicting Black life in the deepest pocket of the American South was so impactful that she would later be granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Northwestern State University of Louisiana. President Jimmy Carter invited her to the White House, and she was the first African-American with works on display in a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of…
