Lithographs 18 x 14 ..............$35............... signed $50
Giclee Fine Art Prints 15 x 12.....................signed $150
Giclee Fine Art Prints 22 x 17.....................signed $275
LightJet Prints 9 x 6 .....................................................$20
First Day Issue Stamps...............................................$20
Hunt Envelopes w/stamp...............................signed $15


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EBONY MAGAZINE: George Hunt (Nov. 2005)

ARTIST George Hunt had always put his personal stamp on his paintings. The Memphis-based artist Often portrays vibrant Southern scenes in his paintings of Black women in church, crowned by colorful hats and stirring images of blues artists caught on canvas right at their rhythmic peak.

However, it was Hunt's painting, America Cares, a tribute to the Little Rock Nine, that was chosen to be featured on a 37-cent U.S. postal stamp as part of a series that captures the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, including works by artists Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

"I was a senior in high school in Hot Springs, which was 45 miles from Little Rock" says Hunt of the historic event in 1957 when nine brave African-American students became the first Blacks to attend Central High School in Arkansas. "My concern was, 'Why did they want to go there?' I reasoned that they were afraid of facing us [Langston High School] because we had a great athletic team."

Hunt, whose great-grandfather was a sharecropper, was born in rural Louisiana and worked in a sugar cane field. He taught art for 36 years and coached football, and it was while he was a coach in 1968 that Dr. Martin L. King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Hunt was at the hospital where the body of the slain civil rights leader had been taken. "I helped put the body on the plane," he says, recalling the intense task. "It was a private plane sent by the president. I remember that Mrs. [Coretta Scott] King was on the plane."

The artist, who began drawing when he was about 4 years old, sold his first piece of art for 25 cents in grade school. In 1997, he was commissioned to do a portrait of the Little Rock Nine. "It was relatively easy for me to do it," he says. "I thought of a young person getting ready to enter school when you are experiencing apprehension and wondering if you will be able to make friends. But these students were going into a hostile environment and aware of that. They had to be afraid, but they didn't want to let down their parents and themselves."

Last year, the U.S. Postal Service got Hunt's permission to create the stamp, which was released publicly in August 2005, when he met for the second time the actual nine students who had integrated the school system. Each one has posed the same question to the artist: "Which one am I?"

"I always ask them, 'Which one do you think you are?'" he says. "Then I wait to see which one [of the students in the paintings] they choose. And if they seem favorable about one, I tell them, 'That's you!'"

This article is COPYRIGHT 2005 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group