Antonio McAfee (b. 1983, Stuttgart, Germany; lives in Baltimore, MD) received his BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C. in 2007 and his MFA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2009. In 2011, he received a post-graduate diploma in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. McAfee has been featured in BmoreArt Magazine, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Mission on Tenth. He participated in residencies at Can Serrat, Barcelona; The Contemporary Museum Artist Retreat, Baltimore; Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro, NC; and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson. He has been awarded the Civil Society Institute Fellowship, Dedalus MFA Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Fulbright IIE Grant and Maryland State Individual Artist Award. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore; University of Maryland, College Park; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Corcoran Gallery of Art; and Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, D.C. He is currently a fellow at Hamiltonian Gallery and an instructor at American University and Maryland Institute College of Art.
Statement from the Artist:
Operating with photography and collage, Antonio McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation. Through appropriating and manipulating historical portraits, he engages in prescribed views of individuals and reworks images to provide an alternate—more layered—image and concept of the people depicted. The source of the artist’s current portraits is The Exhibition of American Negroes organized by W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas Calloway, and Historically Black Colleges for the Paris 1900 International Exposition. The exhibition was a photographic, economic and legislative survey of middle-class blacks in Georgia.