Alfred Conteh, Our Greatest Inheritance

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0:00:05.4 Beth Harris: We’re in the galleries at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, and we’re looking at a painting that was commissioned by the museum from the artist Alfred Conteh. And the title is Our Greatest Inheritance. This is a little different from his previous work, which is mostly about Atlanta and the people of Atlanta. But here we’re looking at a Peoria family.

0:00:29.1 Everley Davis: We invited him to Peoria, and we went out and about, scouring the town, introducing him to different local community organizations. And we just walked around neighborhoods. And we came across this family that was going into a barbershop. We just struck up a conversation with them. Ironically, the father had come and visited the museum a few months prior to that. And the father said that he had toured the museum, and he thought it was great, but he wanted to show me the one piece that stuck out to him on his phone. So he’s scrolling through these photos on his phone, and he showed me the portrait of Malik and Marquis by Alfred Conteh. And I said, do you know who that man is with the camera? That is the artist. And he had no idea. So it was just a happy coincidence. And Conteh’s process, he does not pose people. He just asked if he and his children wanted to get their photo taken together. And he said, You guys do whatever you want. And he just started snapping shots. And that’s how we got to this pose, as it was organic for them.

0:01:24.3 Beth Harris: It’s so interesting that this is inspired by photographs because in a way, to me, it’s so much more alive than a photograph, which is ironic because you think about photography as catching the moment in reality. But the personalities of these children, of the father, I feel like I know them better than I could from any photograph.

0:01:46.8 Everley Davis: It’s all the little things that really shows their personality. So the girl with the fisherman sandals, her crossing her feet. The son in the middle with his feet off kilter. The girl in the green shorts falls further behind. She’s more shy out of the three kids.

0:02:02.2 Beth Harris: And so this importance of portraiture at this moment, for a lot of Black artists.

0:02:07.6 Everley Davis: Conteh really thinks about the people that he’s painting. This is the majority of everyday life for people that isn’t being glorified or celebrated. And it deserves to be seen, large and in charge, with this painting being 10 feet tall.

0:02:22.5 Beth Harris: And it’s a reminder just how rare it is to see images, especially of Black men as fathers in museums and our stereotypes about Black men and fatherhood and the stereotype of the absent Black father. Here this joyous image of fatherhood and his outstretched arms, his palms down, this lovely gesture of protection.

0:02:50.1 Everley Davis: I love that this was captured, this joy and jovial moment. But we know that life every day may not be this level of happy. However, if it was just for a moment that we captured it, we got it. And to remind ourselves that not everything is as somber and heavy. That’s one of the reasons Conteh went with this portrait. When he was here in Peoria, he captured between 20 to 30 different subjects, and we left it up to him to decide which one he wanted to do. And he was led to this one because it was a departure from the typical pensive, somber, more weighted perception that he’s been portraying throughout his portraits.

0:03:28.8 Beth Harris: In his work, he’s drawn to exposing poverty, exposing what he calls benign neglect of communities in the South. But I do have a sense of that idea of benign neglect that he speaks of in his work from the background.

0:03:46.7 Everley Davis: Yeah. Recreating those weathered looks and patinas of grandma’s house and dilapidation that you would see throughout the South and these locations that hold such history that have been worn and torn over time, that’s what he’s creating. It’s both a sense of destruction and disarray, but there’s also comfort in seeing something that’s familiar and has stood the test of time. And so even though these are new portraits, he’s giving them a very lived-in look.

0:04:12.7 Beth Harris: So what came to mind for me, because of that foreshortened arm, is Leonardo da Vinci’s painting called the Virgin of the Rocks, where Mary has her arm out over the head of Christ, and Christ is gesturing towards Saint John the Baptist, and Mary is at the top of that pyramid, but here, this male figure protecting his children. And I also thought about another Renaissance image, the Madonna of Mercy, where the Madonna holds within her opened robe the souls that she’s protecting. Like so many artists today, Conteh seems to be looking back to art history and drawing strength from those traditions and transforming them for his own artistic vision.

0:04:57.9 Everley Davis: Absolutely. And in those works that you referenced, there is a female figure at the top of that triangle. And here we replaced it with a Black father or a Black male, which is often thought of in history as a hyper-aggressive, overbearing, dominating force. But these outstretched hands show a gentle protection, and it’s also dismantling that stereotype. He’s not an authoritative figure here. There’s so much love that’s being depicted with those hands just gently outstretched above his kids, kind of like, these are mine, and I’ve got them.

0:05:31.9 Beth Harris: And the way that his T-shirt stretches from shoulder to shoulder, too, gives us that sense of expansiveness of his chest and a kind of openness and generosity. There’s something playful about him, too, just like the children. There’s a childish joy and pleasure that he expresses about being a father.

0:05:52.5 Everley Davis: These kids just snuggle right up to him. He is their place of safety, of comfort. The girls are both holding on to either of his legs, and then the son is right there in the middle, in the front, maybe taking after dad and being bold in the middle.

0:06:07.5 Beth Harris: So important to see images that change our perceptions of reality. And I’m really grateful for the artist for doing that.

0:06:16.0 Everley Davis: Yeah. Me too.

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The artist’s website

The Peoria Riverfront Museum

Maurita Poole and Phillip Barcio, editors, Alfred Conteh: The Sweet Spot, exhibition catalogue (Atlanta and Chicago: Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and Kavi Gupta, 2019).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, African American art and social justice