Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe & Ivan McClellan: Inheritance

The lumber room is pleased to present Inheritance, an exhibition of photography by Ivan McClellan and paintings by Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, which foregrounds Black agricultural workers and teases out the cyclical nature of knowing, learning, and harvesting amongst these communities.

The pieces in this exhibition not only reflect an inheritance of land and labor—as well diverging economic and socio-political relationships to generational farming in the Southern United States and in Northern Ghana—but the constellation of Black folks that the artists are building relationships with across the two continents. Within Inheritance, portraiture functions as a vehicle through which McClellan and Quaicoe stretch beyond a singular, fleeting moment between artist and subject to recognize their sitters as both uniquely individual and distinctly connected to their ancestral practices.

Without being didactic, the passage of traditional modes of production from generation to generation takes center stage within the works. Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s larger-than-life paintings depicting shea farmers from his home country, Ghana, represent a group of people who are the primary producers of shea butter for the entire world. Despite their highly skilled labor and centuries of refining and adapting ancestral knowledge, anti-black capitalism ensures these farmers remain isolated from their due profits. In shades of black and gray accented by technicolor clothing and pillowy abstract backgrounds, the figures are expanded to nearly eight feet tall—unavoidable at any vantage point. The artist’s use of perspective shift in these portraits dually skews the subject vs. viewer power dynamic and pronunciates the farmers’ existence in and outside the gallery. By immortalizing Ghanaian shea farmers at this scale, Quaicoe acknowledges the human hand in this global commodity and gives space for visitors to do the same.

Ivan McClellan notes that his quiet and pastoral medium format portraits of cattle ranchers, cotton farmers, and horse riders are often taken before or after a thunderstorm, creating an ambience that makes the environments equally as important as his subjects. Between the sky and the soil, he takes indigo and rust-toned images of Black southerners on land their family has owned for generations, often since emancipation. The suite of photographs presented in this exhibition expand on his Black Cowboy series, shifting from the public and performative rodeo space to the intimate corners of farms and ranches of families he’s connected with repeatedly throughout this seven-year project. Piercing through assumptions of inability in these industries and spaces, McClellan’s lens is informed by the Black farmers who own the means of their production.

Together the artists’ works complement and complicate each other, making it difficult to reduce Black farmers to a singular experience. The portrait serves as a document to render visible the experience and education being kept alive within Black agricultural communities. In some ways, the presence of the people in these portraits is proof of continuity. At its core, Inheritance requires time spent with each piece, as both artists do with their subjects. The viewer is left to consider what it means, by choice or necessity, to take up the work of one’s elders and ancestors.

Words by Ella Ray.