Years ago, Michael Hunt sat at his house on Highland Road completing a simple assignment for his freshman art class. Little did he know, a simple school assignment would take him from selling posters before LSU football games for $5 a piece to making art for a president and a pope.In 1985, Hunt was a freshman at the University with his sights set on medical school.”My instinct was not really to become an artist,” Hunt said. “I actually felt that I would go to medical school and do my artwork on the weekends.”Hunt’s interest in drawing led him to take an art course his freshman year at the University. Hunt had an assignment to create a piece of art that would make a nice poster, so he decided to make a poster of Mike the Tiger.”I created my first piece to pay tribute to LSU,” Hunt said. “At the time, there was nothing like it out there.”Hunt said his poster was unique because all the posters of Mike in the ’80s were very macho with the football team involved, while his poster was more of a decorative piece      featuring a serene Mike in a field of purple irises. After some provocation by his professor, Hunt decided to spend his savings to print copies of the poster to sell.”Like every kid at LSU, I had very little money to my name,” Hunt said. “I went to the printing company and printed as many as I could afford. They pretty much felt sorry for me, so they printed like 100 copies of this poster. I rolled them up in a rubber band and got a Schwegmann’s [shopping cart] … and went around campus before and after games and sold posters for $5 a piece. It was about as much as a grassroots effort as you can have.”Hunt said a man approached him and asked how his posters were selling and offered to let him sell his posters on the American Shopping Channel in New Orleans.”This was a regional thing in the New Orleans area way before they had the Home Shopping Network or anything like that,” Hunt said. “So, they put me on the show late one night, and here I am, a little pimple-faced kid with glasses and a little LSU poster.
But he sold thousands in one night, providing him with money to start his own studio.”I guess the rest is history,” Hunt said. “[The start of my career] is very unusual. It was more being at the right place at the right time.”Through his studio, Hunt has made a career of making lithographs and posters with several celebrities and dignitaries. Hunt returned to the University this summer to present a lithograph commemorating the baseball national championship to benefit the Wally Pontiff Jr. Foundation.”Doing work for LSU is a sheer joy,” Hunt said. “It’s very personal to me, and I always involve some form of charity and the coaches.”Though Hunt has worked with former President Clinton and numerous celebrities, he said the highlight of his career was doing a portrait for then-Pope John Paul II and presenting it at the Vatican. Hunt said a group of Louisiana politicians asked him to draw a portrait of the pope as a gift from the state. Hunt said the piece was so well received, it was later mass-produced with proceeds benefiting Catholic charities in New Orleans.”To present something to the pope in front of 70,000 people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome as a gift from the state of Louisiana was the highlight from my life,” Hunt said. “I was not a child of privilege. I was just a kid who liked to draw, and I made it from a shopping basket to the Pope. It really is something I have to step back and say, ‘It’s been a pretty wild ride.'”—-Contact Xerxes A. Wilson at [email protected]