L.V. Hull

Self-proclaimed as “The Unusual Artist,” L.V. Hull merged artmaking and the southern art of “visiting” to transform her Kosciusko home into a wonderland of creativity that attracted pilgrims from around the world.

Hull was born L.V. Bentley on 6 August 1942 in McAdams to Joe Callie Bentley and Lue Willie Bentley, a cotton farmer and midwife, respectively. L.V. was her full name, and she was the middle child, with an older sister named Q.T. and a younger brother named Joe Louis. A creative and resourceful girl, she recalled making “little things out of mud, like little dogs, dolls, and things, little men. We didn’t have no paint back then, way back in the country.” She received her education in nearby Kosciusko at Central Mississippi College, a grammar school, high school, and normal school for African Americans, established in 1893. In 1961, she married Frank Hull, and the couple lived in Kosciusko. They had one child, a son named Joe Frank “Little Joe” Hull, who was born in 1964. Little Joe suffered from a respiratory ailment and other health issues and passed away in 1968 at age four. Hull and her husband divorced in 1965, and she continued to live in Kosciusko, supporting herself through domestic work.

Hull purchased her own home on Allen Street in Kosciusko shortly after her thirty-second birthday in 1974. Homeownership was a catalyst for Hull’s creativity, and she noted that she “started working with” her imagination in 1975. She adopted the property as her sanctuary, studio, and primary canvas, and initially curated her space with a dense collection of found, purchased, and gifted objects, such as hats, purses, perfume bottles, and glassware, that spoke to her aesthetic sensibilities. Her home studio became a site of experimentation where she honed her creative practice for the remainder of her life. The signature facets of her practice included painted signs with personal maxims like, “Do not try to understand me, just love me;” assemblages that she referred to as “plaquettes” that utilized found objects like buttons, costume jewelry, beads, and more; and assorted domestic objects like household fixtures and mass-produced toys and decorative items painted with her signature dots—a treatment she referred to as “doing the L.V.” She even adorned herself in hand-painted shoes, hats, and other articles of clothing. As one guest described, “It’s hard to tell where the art stops and L.V. begins.”

Hull’s abundant interior collections began spilling out onto her front porch and into her yard sometime in the 1980s with assorted objects carefully arranged to create an art environment that took the form of a found-object garden. Exterior motifs included shoes affixed to the top of stakes planted in the yard, and she was sometimes referred to as “the shoe lady.” She eventually began painting the items on display, adding more and more until the installation took up every inch of the front of her property. This brightly colored and ever-changing yard display became the creative hallmark for which she was best known and, according to her numerous annual guest books, it attracted visitors from around the region, the nation, and the world.

Hull’s health began to decline in the early 2000s, but she continued to make art and welcome visitors. Friends in the community stepped in to provide support, often supplying Hull with meals, artmaking materials, and company. She passed away on 15 April 2008 and was buried next to Little Joe at Bethlehem Baptist Church Cemetery in McAdams.

In 2010, a group of local supporters called the Friends of L.V. Hull worked with Hull’s sister Q.T. Tinnin to settle her estate and salvage as much of her artwork and personal effects from her home as possible. The collection was conserved by the Kohler Foundation and gifted to the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko in 2022. This collection will be on display at the forthcoming L.V. Hull Legacy Center, which includes Hull’s preserved home, on her street in Kosciusko. Hull’s home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024—the first home studio of a Black female visual artist to be listed at the level of national significance and the first home of any Black art environment creator to be included on the Register.