Clementine Hunter (1887 1988) painted every day from the 1930s until several days before her death at age 101. As a cook and domestic servant at Louisiana s Melrose Plantation, she painted on hundreds of objects available around her glass snuff bottles, discarded roofing shingles, ironing boards as well as on canvas. She produced between five and ten thousand paintings, including her most ambitious work, the African House Murals. Her paintings of cotton planting and harvesting, washdays, weddings, baptisms, funerals, Saturday night revelry, and zinnias depict her experiences of everyday plantation life along the Cane River. More than a personal record of Hunter s life, her work also reflects the social, material, and cultural aspects of the area s larger African American community.