Mayfield resident Helen LaFrance spent a lifetime creating quilts and wood carvings, but she was in her 60s when she became known for painting pictures that captured the lives of rural Black Kentuckians. The pictures are unforgettable for their depictions of Black joy. Her brightly colored scenes of tent revivals, funeral processions, church picnics, outdoor baptisms, and bountiful kitchens of days gone by drew comparisons to the work of Grandma Moses and Horace Pippin.
Her work was unique in that she used sense memories of her life on her family’s farm in rural Graves County, Kentucky in the 1920s and ‘30s to construct the scenes. As recounted in a New York Times article on LaFrance, she said: “It’s just a way of reliving it all again.”
LaFrance was born in 1919, the second of four girls. Her father owned his farm, which was rare for an African American in the Jim Crow South. She was busy on the farm, but spent her spare time drawing, a passion she carried into adulthood. LaFrance’s first work was a large gray rabbit painted in watercolors on the back of a piece of wallpaper, according to a bio on the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights’ webpage.
“Mom used to hold my hand and help me to draw things,” LaFrance said in a news release celebrating her 100th birthday. LaFrance remembered how her mother kept her supplied in paints by blending laundry bluing with dandelions and berries.
In her 40s, Helen made enough money to buy art supplies and began painting between loading dried tobacco onto conveyor belts in the tobacco barns, cleaning offices, and painting novelty whiskey bottles at a ceramics plant. In 1986, in her 60s, she began painting full time.
She painted for herself, guided by her unique vision. As she noted in the New York Times article, she said: “If I do something somebody likes, well, I’m satisfied because somebody liked what I did, but I don’t think it’s important.”
Kathy Moses Shelton, co-author with the gallerist Bruce Shelton of “Helen LaFrance: Folk Art Memories” (2011), called Ms. LaFrance “an American treasure.” As she said in LaFrance’s New York Times obituary, “Her art doesn’t reflect the pain of that era. Instead, what comes through is joy, and the values of family and work. Her family owned and farmed their own land when sharecropping was the norm, and they were self-sufficient and lived in dignity. Her blend of personal experience, Black American culture and heritage, and her skill all come into play to make her work unlike anybody else’s. She’s an authentic American voice.”
Gus Van Sant Sr., a native of Mayfield and the father of the filmmaker, met LaFrance in the early 1990s; about a decade earlier, his wife, Betty, had bought him a Helen LaFrance painting of a tobacco barn. The couple looked her up when they moved back to Kentucky.
Mr. Van Sant was taken with her work and grew concerned that she was not getting the value she deserved from the sales of her paintings. He and a friend reached out to folk art galleries and institutions around the country on her behalf and helped her set up a bank account so that she could be paid directly.
In 2011, Ms. LaFrance received Kentucky’s Folk Art Heritage Award. Oprah Winfrey, Bryant Gumbel, and the collector Beth Rudin DeWoody have all bought her work. It has also been exhibited at the Speed Museum and is in the permanent collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art in Owensboro, Ky.
The Speed show, “Kentucky Women: Helen LaFrance” featured more than 35 pieces, including LaFrance’s “memory paintings,” her hand-carved wooden dolls, and sculptures.
LaFrance lived close to where she grew up outside of Mayfield, KY. She died peacefully in her sleep in late 2020 at the age of 101.
In 2022, the Helen LaFrance Foundation, a nonprofit organization, was founded by Bruce Shelton to preserve her legacy and to secure her place in the canon of American art. The foundation is dedicated to collecting, archiving and exhibiting the works of art of Helen LaFrance and other self-taught artists to further public knowledge and appreciation of the visual arts with programs that assist the education and development of local, national and international art communities. Shelton’s hope is that LaFrance gets her “rightful place in American art history,” and, someday, a major museum retrospective of her work. “Curators will see it, collectors will see it,” he continued. “A young child’s life may be changed by going in there and seeing this exhibit.”