Antonio McAfee

Antonio McAfee is a photographer based in Richmond, Indiana, whose work addresses the complexity of representation by appropriating and manipulating photographic portraits of African Americans in the 19th century, funk and R&B musicians, and transitioned family members. He received his BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and he earned his MFA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Post-Graduate Diploma in Art in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa).

McAfee was featured in BmoreArt Magazine, Baltimore Magazine, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Mission on Tenth published by California Institute of Integrated Studies, and catalogs published by the University of Pennsylvania and Corcoran College of Art and Design. He has participated in residencies at Vis Arts (MD), Wesley Theological Seminary (DC), Elsewhere Museum (NC), The Contemporary Museum Artist Retreat (Baltimore), Can Serrat (Spain), and Vermont Studio Center.

McAfee has been awarded grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art (NY), Art on the Vine (DC), Maryland State Arts Council, Civil Society Institute, Fulbright IIE, and Dedalus Foundation. His work has been exhibited at the Walters Art Museum (MD), Kreeger Museum (DC), Institute of Contemporary Art (MD), Academy Art Museum (MD), Hamiltonian Gallery (DC), and The Print Center (PA). He is currently a Professor at Earlham College.

Through the Layers series, 2017-2019

Pigment print, 3D image with 3D glasses

“The brain did not evolve to see the world the way it is…the brain evolved to see the world in a way that was useful to see in the past…we inherit perception…” - Dr. Beau Lotto.

Appropriating photographs from W.E.B Du Bois and Thomas Calloway’s “Exhibition of American Negroes” (1900) and the “Ronald Rooks Collection” (housed at University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s, Albin O. Kuhn Special Collections) into various 3D images and collages, I attempt to provide alternate ways to see figures, ways that allow for subjects to have multitudes of possibilities, real and imagined within a still image. The “Exhibition of American Negroes” was a pictorial, economic, and legislative survey of middle-class African Americans in Georgia. Ronald Rooks was a Maryland entrepreneur who collected vernacular African American photographs in the Civil War period.

In my series “Through the Layers”, the reimagined images provide a less static and more inexplicable depiction of the individuals, breaking down their image to reveal colorful versions that play with the act of viewing. Shifting positions while viewing the images allows the audience to view these sitters in a state that is in flux, opening up an engagement that is physical and pictorial, aiming to redefine normality, adding to the cycle of upgrading our perception of others that could start a constructive shift in biases and assumptions they would be passed on, crafting new legacies.