writing – Page 5

Clementine Hunter – Folk Artist

Clementine Hunter is celebrated for her use of bold colors and shapes to narrate plantation life in 19th and 20th century Louisiana as an African American. Clementine Hunter is Louisiana’s most famous female artist, and she is one of the most important folk artists of all time.
Her work can be seen in the Smithsonian Institute, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, the High Museum of Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the New York Historical Association, the Oprah Winfrey Collection in Chicago and many other museums and private collections across the country.[1]

Dr. Selma Burke – Sculptor

Some of Burke’s most notable sculptures include Temptation (1938), Despair (1951), Fallen Angel(1958), Mother and Child (1968), and Together (1975). A nine-foot statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. she completed while in her eighties is on display in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received numerous awards and honors which included three honorary doctorate degrees. In 1979 Burke was recognized by President Jimmy Carter for her contribution to African American art history.[4]

Augusta Savage – Sculptor

In the 1920s Augusta Savage received commissions to create portrait busts of W.E.B. Du Bois and black nationalist Marcus Garvey; both pieces were hailed for their power and dynamism. On the strength of these works and especially the poignant Gamin (1929)—a portrait bust of a streetwise boy and one of Savage’s few extant pieces—she received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship that enabled her finally to study in Paris in 1929–31.**