“Conversations about Clementine Hunter in 2014” with Tom Whitehead will be held on Tuesday in the Merkle and Price Galleries.  This event is free and open to the public. The galleries will be open at 6pm for anyone who would like to come in and look at the artwork in advance of the talk.

Whitehead, author and professor emeritus of journalism at Northwestern State university of Natchitoches, Louisiana, will host the informative talk about the artist and her art.

When Whitehead met Clementine Hunter in 1966, he was an undergraduate at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Invited by the supervisor of his student job to accompany her to Melrose Plantation along Cane River, Whitehead rode along.

“We first stopped at Clementine’s small cabin located across the road from Melrose,” he writes. “I met the artist and bought my first painting for three dollars, a bowl of zinnias. Then we drove around to Melrose and visited François

[Mignon] on the porch of Yucca House. Little could I have imagined how the events of that simple afternoon trip would shape the next forty years of my life.”

Whitehead and Art Shiver co-authored the book Clementine Hunter Her Life and Art, published in 2012 and co-edited the book Clementine Hunter: The African House Murals in 2005.

Whitehead, a native of Baton Rouge, graduated from NSU in 1967. At Boston University, he earned a master’s degree in public relations and communications. In 1969, he returned to NSU to teach. He retired in 1999 but remains a consultant on special projects to the university president.

“For me Clementine’s story is more than pictures on boards,” he writes in the book. “It is the story of the most remarkable person I ever met. . . . She was not educated, she never traveled, she never had an art lesson, but Clementine Hunter taught me much. I learned from her that intelligence, wit, and talent arise sometimes from the least likely among us.”

For more information about the talk, contact the SAAC office at 862-5474.