Helen LaFrance is a self-taught African-American artist born in 1919 in Graves County, Kentucky, the second of four daughters to James Franklin Orr and Lillie May Ligon Orr. Though the terms are confining, Helen is often described as both an outsider artist due to her lack of formal training and existence outside the cultural mainstream and as a folk artist best known for her memory painting of the disappearing lifestyle of the rural South. She also painted powerful and intensely spiritual visionary interpretations of the Bible, in a style that differed radically from her memory paintings. LaFrance grew up in a nurturing household under Jim Crow laws, which between 1876 and 1965 prescribed segregation and disadvantaged social, economic and educational conditions for African Americans in the United States. Her father owned and farmed his land, growing tobacco, corn, black-eyed peas, beans, peanuts and sorghum, in a time when share-cropping was customary. Her parents bought school books to teach her at home and, after her chores were completed, she drew and carved in her spare time. [More at Wikipedia]