Helen LaFrance

Biography

Helen LaFrance (November 2, 1919 – November 20, 2020) was a self-taught Black American artist born in Graves County, Kentucky, the second of four daughters to James Franklin Orr and Lillie May Ligon Orr. Helen has often been described as both an outsider artist due to her lack of formal training and existence outside the cultural mainstream and as a memory painter, best known for her captures of the disappearing lifestyle of the rural South. Sharing traits in common with memory painters Horace Pippin (1888–1946) and Grandma Moses (1860–1961), LaFrance has been referred to as "the Black Grandma Moses." She also painted powerful and intensely spiritual visionary interpretations of the Bible, in a style that differed radically from her memory paintings.

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