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Watching My Mother Create Art By Leslie Hunter-Gadsden
Long before community organizations and parents pressed school districts to bring art back into classrooms, my mother taught me that art was important. Growing up in New York City during the 1970s in an apartment in Washington Heights with my mom meant there was either jazz, rhythm and blues or classical music on the stereo, and an easel with oil paint, watercolors or a sketchpad out as she completed college art assignments. She did this while raising me and holding down a full-time job as a public-school secretary. Later, she went back to college to earn her master's degree and became a high school business education teacher. When my mom put herself through college at night, she decided to study something that she loved — visual art. To be honest, Catherine W. Hunter loved all forms of art. Dance, music, theater, writing, sketching, painting, sculpting and even sewing. She exposed me to these art forms at an early age and scrimped and saved so I could take my beloved dance classes from the age of four.
Self-portrait by Catherine W. Hunter
From the time I was about five until I was 15, she focused on getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts from City College. It became our norm to take weekend trips to museums. Often, she took along a sketch pad, and in mimicking her, I took along mine as well. She would tell me about the painters she was studying whether it was during the Impressionist period, or Modern art from Picasso. She opened my eyes to the work of Jacob Lawrence, just as she played jazz music by Miles Davis or Sarah Vaughn and classical music by Tchaikovsky. Mom wanted me to know that artists came in all ethnicities and genders.
When my mom put herself through college at night, she decided to study something that she loved – visual art.
Watching her throughout my childhood made me believe that I too could express myself artistically.
A Black woman who had graduated from high school in 1950, my mom found a way to take a leave from her secretarial job in 1955, so she could travel to Europe at 22 and study at the University of Florence for three months.
Read more stories like this on NextAvenue.org. Photo credit: Leslie Hunter-Gadsden
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NEXTAVENUE.ORG
MARCH 2023
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