March 2 | 5:30 PM
Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Fl. 1

In celebration of the closing of Alfred Conteh’s solo exhibition, It Is What It Is, at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., Conteh will be joined by Danny Dunson, Director of Curatorial Services at the DuSable Black History Museum, for a conversation surrounding the foundational concepts and social and material processes behind the artist’s acclaimed portraiture series, Two Fronts. The work elucidates Conteh’s statement that Black Americans are fighting battles on two separate fronts—one from the outside, and one from within.

Conteh paints portraits of people he meets in and around Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives and works. He gets to know the people he paints; he learns about their personal histories, asks about their aspirations and the challenges they’ve faced. His portraits capture their outward countenance—their body, posture, and fashion—wIth photorealistic perfection, while his acrylic paints are augmented with earthen elements like soil, concrete, metal dust, and melted urethane in order to arrive at a deeper truth—elemental evidence of toughness amid dereliction.

“When you see my work, you see cracked surfaces, weathered paint, things left to ruin,” Conteh says. “When I paint these things, that’s the reality of a people. That’s the type of story I’m telling in this work, through the materials. The only beauty that I see in it is that folks are still here despite those circumstances.”
 

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