c.1887-1988 · Natchitoches, Louisiana, USA
She picked cotton, cooked for a plantation, found some paints a guest left behind, and spent fifty years painting the world she had worked in. Admission to see them: 25 cents.
The life
Hunter was born on a Louisiana plantation and spent most of her hundred years at Melrose, first in the fields, then in the kitchen. Melrose hosted visiting artists, and around 1939, in her fifties, Hunter salvaged discarded tubes of paint and began making what she called her marks. She painted thousands of works, sold them at her cabin door, and charged visitors a quarter to look. She died in 1988, having lived to see museums fight over what she once swapped for small change.
The work
Flat, vivid scenes of cotton picking, weddings, funerals, baptisms and Saturday nights, painted from memory on window shades, bottles, gourds and board. Her African House murals at Melrose are a landmark of American self-taught art.
Why we love them
She documented a world from inside it, with the calm of someone who owed art history nothing.
Go deeper
- Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
- The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.
Kindred spirits
Nellie Mae Rowe1900-1982, Vinings, Georgia, USA
Sister Gertrude Morgan1900-1980, New Orleans, USA
← All 46 artists in the field guide
Untrained and unstoppable, like them? Like us?