Born into poverty, Minnie Evans was raised in North Carolina by her grandmother. Too poor to continue in school after the sixth grade, despite loving history and “reading about the Gods”, Evans labored as a fish-seller on the Delaware River Sound. In 1918, she became a domestic worker at an elegant estate whose beautiful surroundings inspired her first wax crayon paintings in 1935 (now at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art). By the 1940s she was producing hundreds of works at the gatehouse of the estate and selling them to tourists. Her talent was recognized by a collector and patron of the arts who bought over five hundred paintings and arranged art shows and sales. Most of Evans’ paintings and drawings are similar, yet no two are identical. They represent a cosmos in which God, man, and nature are inextricable: God is frequently winged, encircled in a curvilinear garden paradise of butterflies, eyes, trees, plants, and flora painted in soft, clear colors. Often, the encircled object is not God but a face with piercing eyes and full lips. Evans produced about one thousand visionary paintings and drawings in her lifetime. Her work has been collected and shown by museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and many more.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Thornton Dial was a pioneering African-American artist who produced exuberant drawings and paintings and large scale assemblages and sculptures with oil paint and the found material he collected. The work by Dial most admired in the art world are his assemblages commenting on race and the place of African-Americans in the larger society. Dial rightfully credited Bill Arnett, founder of the Souls Run Deep Foundation, as the person who recognized and championed his artistry. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Houston Museum of Art, Houston, TX; and the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, MD; among many others.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Clementine Hunter (pronounced Clementeen) was born to Creole parents, Antoinette Adams and Janvier Reuben, in late December of 1886 or early January of 1887 at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Hunter would never learn to read or write, later saying she only had about ten days of schooling, and was put to work in the fields when she was very young. At 15, she left Hidden Hill, which is considered to have been the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is today known as Little Eva Plantation, for Melrose Plantation, where she would change her name from Clemence to Clementine.

At Melrose, she would pick cotton and give birth to her first two children. After their father died in 1914, she married Emmanuel Hunter in 1924 and the couple remained at Melrose, where they both worked. She would give birth to another five children, two of whom were stillborn, picking cotton until the day before she gave birth and returning to the fields shortly thereafter. By her mid-30s, Clementine would begin to work as a cook and housekeeper. She would never travel more than 100 miles from home.

By the 1930s, Melrose Plantation had begun to be something of an artist colony, and when New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left behind brushes and tubes of paint, Hunter painted her first picture – on a window shade. Her work would come to the attention of the plantation’s curator, Francois Mignon, and in addition to supplying her with materials, Mignon would help Hunter get her work displayed locally. They would later collaborate on a Melrose Plantation cookbook.

A color photograph of artist Clementine Hunter (Louisiana), in a blue smock holding a rooster. (p4A item # D9957218)

Hunter continued to paint, often producing artwork on any scraps she could find, from paper bags to window shades to jugs, hanging a sign outside her cabin that charged “25 cents to Look.” Her works illustrated the daily life of the early 20th-century plantation – picking cotton or pecans, doing chores, commemorating baptisms or weddings – and as such make valuable socioeconomic and cultural contributions as well as artistic ones. She was a prolific painter, creating an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 works between the late 1930s and her death on January 1, 1988, but her work is also considered uneven, likely because so many pieces were created in haste and because she continued to live in poverty most of her life, so values for her work can vary widely. Works from the 1940s and 50s are typically considered her best works.

Clementine Hunter (American/Louisiana, 1886-1988) oil on canvas board painting, “Pecan Pickin’”, circa 1955. (p4A item # E8882656)

In the 1940s, Hunter sold work for as little as a single quarter and by the late 1970s, she was selling pieces for several hundred dollars. By the time of her death in 1988, dealers were selling her works for thousands of dollars. Fame did find her late in life, with Hunter landing a solo exhibition, the first African-American artist to do so, at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). She received an invitation to the White House from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and would receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986.

Hunter’s work is naive and simplistic enough in nature that there have been instances of forgery. This is complicated by the fact that she painted on a wide variety of materials, rarely titled her works, and because they were originally sold from her front door for pocket change, there is rarely anything resembling a firm provenance. Her work also tends to sell in a price range that makes forgeries easy enough to pass off – they can sell cheaply enough without drawing suspicion and they tend to sell in a price point where buyers are often less likely to do or demand research and are unlikely to spend the funds for a full authentication.
Reference Note by p4A editorial staff, 2011.

Artist Note Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019:

The descendant of enslaved people, Clementine Hunter was born in the Cane River region of central Louisiana at Hidden Hill, the infamous plantation said to have inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She worked for most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation. A self-taught artist and one of the field’s best-known, she didn’t start painting until she was in her 50s. After work, Hunter recorded everyday plantation life from memory, whether picking cotton in the fields or baptisms and funerals. Her palette is bright, her faces usually dark in tone and without expression. She disregards perspective and scale. Her earlier work was on found material; she graduated to canvas and board when patrons gave her art supplies and orders for specific images which she often repeated on request. Her signature changed over the years from “Clemence” to “C H” to “CH” to a backward “C” superimposed over the letter “H”. This is considered a fairly reliable method by which to date her paintings. Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her work. Even with success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until it was (ironically) sold at auction in 1970. She lived out her days in a small trailer a few miles away. The sale stripped Melrose of many Hunter murals that adorned its buildings. Her African House Murals, painted in 1955, were preserved, and can be seen at the African House at Melrose Plantation, now a named National Historical Landmark.

Willie Massey is a self-taught artist from Kentucky who spent his life as a tenant dairy farmer. He made only utilitarian objects before his wife’s death in 1955. After, he began to make sculptures, which he called “tricks”. He fashioned animals and birds, farm equipment, birdhouses and airplanes from found objects and repurposed material. He would also buy stretched canvases and paint on the backs to create pre-made frames for his images. Massey is probably best known for his birdhouses, his wingless birds made from aluminum foil painted with enamel, and his airplanes. He died in 1990 as a result of burns suffered in a fire in his home. In 1998 Massey’s art was featured in the exhibition African-American Folk Art in Kentucky at the Kentucky Folk Art Center . His work is included in many permanent collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Morris Museum of Art, Morristown, NJ; and the University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford, MS.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Roy Ferdinand was a self-taught artist who chronicled street life in New Orleans’ impoverished African-American neighborhoods for fifteen years, documenting its violent subculture and making portraits of residents who had no choice but to share these mean streets. Ferdinand, who compared himself to a battlefield sketch artist, worked in ink markers, colored pencils and children’s watercolors on poster board. His style, with its bodies slightly out of proportion, multiple vanishing points, and tilted buildings, has been described as a metaphor for New Orleans in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack epidemic raged and the city had the country’s highest murder rate. Ferdinand was represented in New Orleans by Barrister’s Gallery in his lifetime. His prodigious body of work is held in private collections, galleries, and museums across the country.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Mary T. Smith was born Mary Tillman, the daughter of a sharecropper. School was a strain, despite her intelligence, as her hearing was impaired. She worked for most of her life as a domestic laborer. In 1941, the father of her only child built a home for her in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. It was near a garbage dump piled with discarded corrugated tin that was free for the taking and Smith dragged home piece after piece of it, splitting off strips with an ax. Gradually Smith’s yard began to fill with art. She constructed a series of outbuildings cum wood and tin sculptures, usually painted with the animated patterns and designs that make up her private language of symbols: the circle within a circle, sunbursts, vertical or horizontal strips, dot patterns and words that are not words at all. She also created bold, colorful, and expressive paintings, usually using house paint on wood or tin, often of highly stylized figures in strong colors. Smith’s art was championed broadly by the curator and collector William Arnett. By the time she died at the age of ninety-one, she had become a major outsider artist exhibited and collected throughout the world. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; among many other institutions.

Information courtesy of Rago Arts, October 2019.

Highly regarded as a sculptor, painter, printmaker and teacher, Catlett has been a major force in the African-American and Mexican art communities. Over her long career, she has used her considerable talent and skill in championing the cause of women, minorities and working people. Born in Washington, DC, she was the child of two teachers. She studied art at Howard University, earning a Bachelor’s Degree and then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she was the first woman of African-American descent to earn a Masters Degree. She was deeply influenced by her teacher there, Grant Wood, who encouraged his students to look to the subjects they knew best for inspiration. In her case, she focused on her racial heritage and women’s issues. While her art exposes the harsh realities of life for the African-Amerian woman, it does so with tenderness and grace.

Catlett has spent much of her adult life in Mexico. She received a Rosenwald Fellowship to study there in 1946 and developed a working relationship with Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Francisco Mora, whom she later married. She became the first woman professor of sculpture and later Chair of the Department of Sculpture at the National School of Fine Arts Mexico.

Information courtesy of Sotheby’s, September 2008.