Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, Mixed Media, Installation
Keba Armand Konte was born and raised in San Francisco and has long been rooted in Oakland. He is the child of an interracial couple — his mother was a photographer and his father was a carpenter with a background in philosophy. He wrestled at San Francisco State while studying photojournalism, and in 1994 went to South Africa to cover the country’s first all-race election. There he photographed the newly elected president, Nelson Mandela. During the 1990s, Konte funded his extensive travels through Africa and elsewhere by working as a photojournalist covering the hip-hop scene for publications including Rolling Stone, Vibe, and The Source, as well as shooting CD covers for notable hip-hop and R&B artists.
In the early 2000s, Konte transitioned from documentary photojournalism to studio-based fine art practice. He moved into a career as a critically-acclaimed visual artist, producing unique documentary-style pieces alongside installation, conceptual, and interactive art. He is identified in the SFSU alumni record with a B.A. received in 1994. He is an artist, food entrepreneur, and community man whose artwork has been published widely and exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. He is the co-founder of Guerilla Cafe, the founder of Chasing Lions Cafe, and the founder and roaster for Red Bay Coffee.
Konte works by assembling surfaces of found and salvaged wood, furniture parts, copper, and other materials rich in texture and history. He then paints, burns, and distresses these materials and imbues his own photographic images into the surfaces in order to create multi-layered works of art which explore socio-political aspects of the African Diaspora. He shoots photographs and transfers the images onto flat pieces of wood using a proprietary chemical process, then adorns the surfaces with materials such as oil paint, gold leaf, nails, and rope — sometimes blackening parts of the image with a blow torch or inlaying a small print photograph into the surface. His more recent work has progressed into the realm of sculpture and site-specific installations.
One of his great influences has been his extensive international travel experience. In works like Bissa High Cloud, a photograph of a child is transferred onto wood, with the textured grain of the wood showing through the photo transfer; the rough quality of the wood evokes driftwood, suggesting themes of water, movement, and diaspora. In his large-scale public work, Konte has used spray paint and thousands of small, meticulously tied ribbons to transform a chain-link fence in West Oakland into a shimmering portrait of Oscar Grant. Throughout his practice, Konte consistently ties formal craft to urgent questions of Black identity, community memory, and the African Diaspora.
Bissa High Cloud (2003) — Photo transfer on wood and copper, held in the permanent collection of the Mills College Art Museum, portraying a young Black child in a work that evokes themes of diaspora and cross-continental Black identity.
888 Pieces of We (2008) — Epic installation of 888 photographs printed on wood, copper, and vintage books, surveying four decades of the artist’s documentary and portrait work.
SF Gate article - Beauty is ingrained in Berkeley artist’s portraits
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