"When you pick cotton, you sweat with your body; when you paint, you sweat with your mind." — Clementine Hunter
Clementine Hunter (late December 1886 or early January 1887 – January 1, 1988) was a self-taught African American folk artist of the Louisiana Creole tradition, born at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville and a lifelong resident of the Cane River region of Natchitoches Parish. She worked as a farm laborer from childhood, never learned to read or write, and began painting in her fifties on materials left behind by an artist visiting Melrose Plantation, where she lived and worked for most of her life. The French writer François Mignon, then in residence at Melrose, recognized her gift and encouraged her, and over the next half-century she produced an estimated five thousand to ten thousand paintings recording the daily life, labor, religion, and recreation of the Cane River world she knew.
Hunter became the first African American artist to be given a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986, and was invited to the White House by President Jimmy Carter. Her work is held in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Louisiana State Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which holds twenty-two of her works — the largest single-artist holding in its collection. In 2019 the Louisiana State Legislature designated October 1 as Clementine Hunter Day.