At age 67, Clementine Hunter painted nine room-size murals for a building on the Louisiana plantation where she worked. “God gave me the power. Sometimes I try to quit painting. I can’t, I can’t,” she once said, according to the director of the Folk Art Institute, Lee Kogan.

On Tuesday, the American Folk Art Museum hosted a lecture on selftaught artists of the 20th century. Ms. Kogan began by observing that public awareness of African-American vernacular or folk art was “virtually absent or under-recognized until 1980, when the Corcoran Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, ‘Black Folk Art in America, 1930 to 1980.'”

Ms. Kogan spoke about four female African-American painters, including Hunter, who was born near Natchitoches, La. Her family moved from Hidden Hill, which was supposedly the plantation setting of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” to Melrose Plantation. Hunter “was without peer as a diarist of plantation life,” Ms. Kogan said. Hunter lived to 101 and worked far more than a half-century as a field hand, laundress, cook, and domestic worker at Melrose. She picked about 250 pounds of cotton a day and bore seven children to two husbands. In midlife, Ms. Kogan said, Hunter worked as a cook and performed other domestic duties but found time to make two dozen quilts that preceded her paintings.

The co-owner of the plantation was a weaver who attracted artists and writers to the plantation, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Hunter apparently first began by using discarded tubes of paint left behind by a guest.

Hunter completed about 5,000 paintings covering “every available surface,” including glass and plastic bottles. At a university in Natchitoches, she was not allowed to attend an exhibition of her own work in the early 1950s due to Jim Crow laws. One of her supporters, a dean named Mildred Bailey, later helped arrange for Hunter to receive an honorary degree from the school.

Ms. Kogan showed slides of Hunter’s work,depicting rural Louisiana: scenes of ginning cotton, harvesting gourds, pecans, and figs. She also depicted women washing clothes and working, as well as lighter scenes of people playing cards and socializing.

Ms. Kogan next turned to artist Minnie Evans, who had a one-person exhibition in 1975 at the Whitney Museum and two decades later a show at the American Folk Art Museum. Her art involved wax crayons on paper. She also experimented with watercolor, tempera, and oil paintings.”Art took Evans on imaginary journeys of beauty, mystery, and freedom,” Ms. Kogan said. Evans also made a few large collages, after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while in town for an exhibition of her work at one of the New York galleries.

The bright palette in her work resonated with imagery of the sun and moon, rainbows, sunsets, and stars. Her work evoked a “special reverence for the universe,” Ms. Kogan said. Her last artwork at age 89 was an attempt at realism – a smiling self-portrait.

Folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe, who was born in Fayetteville, Ga., was a picture maker and doll maker. Ms. Kogan said Rowe was deeply spiritual, but not always in a formal way. She thought there was a little too much preaching in church, though she liked singing. A slide of hands raised in prayer was shown as an example of the religious and spiritual expressions throughout her work.

She was also fond of using unusual media, such as Styrofoam packing materials.”I don’t know of any other artist who shaped sculptures using chewing gum,” Ms. Kogan said. The audience chuckled when Ms. Kogan said Rowe only used her own gum and was partial to beechnut or spearmint.

The final artist featured was sculptor Bessie Harvey, who was born in Dallas, Ga., and lived in Alcoa,Tenn. Her work, Ms. Kogan noted, evokes communion with forces of nature, sometimes healing, sometimes menacing.

The Knickerbocker later asked the lecturer about the increase in the value of folk art. She cited the example of the work of Bill Traylor, whose silhouettes on cardboard were made while working on the streets of Montgomery, Ala., between 1939 and 1942. Traylor sold his work for as low as $1; his works now start at $30,000.

Ms. Kogan told a story of a woman who bought seven or eight pieces directly from Traylor. What did she do with them? She sent them to friends as Christmas cards. “How many people save Christmas cards?” Ms. Kogan asked the Knickerbocker.

gshapiro@nysun.com