Hunter painted what she had seen: a hundred-year sweep of African American life on the Cane River, recorded from inside the world she was depicting and translated into a body of work that has become one of the most important visual records of twentieth-century Southern life.
Hunter's life almost wholly preceded her career as an artist. Born to a Louisiana Creole family in the Cane River country of north-central Louisiana, she was working in the cotton fields by adolescence and would continue to support herself as a farm and domestic laborer for most of her long life. By the late 1920s she had moved to Melrose Plantation, where she worked first in the fields and pecan orchards and later as a housemaid, occasional cook, and nanny to the Henry children, and where she would remain for the rest of her life.
Melrose, by accident of its owner Cammie Henry's interests, had become one of the most significant artistic and literary gathering places of the early twentieth-century South. Henry had opened the property to writers and painters in residence, and the rotating presence of working artists in the cabins and outbuildings gave Hunter a daily proximity to the materials and habits of art-making that she would otherwise never have had. The decisive turn came in 1939, when she found brushes and tubes of paint left behind by the visiting New Orleans painter Alberta Kinsey, asked François Mignon if she might use them, and, on a discarded window shade, painted her first picture: a Cane River baptism.
Mignon recognized what he was looking at and became her first advocate. Over the following years Hunter developed a body of work entirely from memory, painted on whatever surface came to hand, wood, cardboard, iron pots, snuff jars, glass bottles, and eventually canvas board, and built up the running pictorial chronicle of Cane River life for which she is now known: cotton picking, pecan harvesting, Saturday-night honky-tonks, baptisms, weddings, funerals, washing day, zinnias and irises, and the figures of the plantation as she had observed them across half a century.
The most ambitious of these works are the African House Murals, painted in the summer of 1955 when she was sixty-eight. Across nine large plywood panels installed on the second floor of Melrose's African House, a singular vernacular structure on the property, Hunter laid out a panoramic view of plantation life from work and faith to leisure and death. Painted from sketches she had prepared for each panel and completed in roughly six weeks of summer labor, the African House Murals stand today as one of the major works of twentieth-century American folk painting and as her most fully realized statement.
Recognition arrived gradually. Her first paintings sold for as little as twenty-five cents; by the end of her life her work was being acquired by major museums and trading on the secondary market for thousands of dollars. The arc from anonymous Cane River farm laborer to nationally recognized American painter is one of the more striking trajectories of any twentieth-century American artist, and her standing has only deepened in the decades since her death, as the institutions of American art history have caught up with the body of work she built, almost entirely from memory, in her own voice, within the world she had been born into.