Chevron Quilt

Clementine Hunter was a self-taught artist who lived most of her life on plantations in rural Louisiana. Hunter did not begin painting until her 50s, after an artist visiting the plantation where she worked, which was also an artists’ colony, left behind their paint and paintbrushes. During her lifetime, she painted thousands of works prized for their strong graphic quality, exuberant color palette, and moving portrayal of African-American life in the South. Like assemblage artists of the same period, she worked on any surface or object she could find—walls, canvas, bottles, and jugs. She was also an accomplished quilter, creating quilts that depicted recognizable scenes, and also quilts like this one that are composed of abstract arrangements of fabrics, patterns and forms. The connections between artists like Rauschenberg and under-recognized artists like Hunter is only just beginning to be acknowledged and understood.