Blog

Robert Anthony Ketchens grew up in New Orleans, a city where the unique synthesis of art and history from many cultures are woven into the very fabric of daily life. The Big Easy gave birth within him a sense of a “social narrative” before he had a name for it.

By the time he joined the Air Force in 1970 at 18, he was a driven and accomplished artist.

Ketchens will exhibit his oil paintings

Robert Anthony Ketchens

May 1-June 20 in Gallery 3R at Contemporary Art Center. His colorful paintings build a bridge between tradition and modernity, memory and vision. He will provide an Artist Talk at 6 p.m. in the gallery during First Friday May, and he will also be one of the presenters for CAC’s Juneteenth Celebration from 6:30-8:30 p.m. June 20.

In the Air Force, he was selected for the special position of medical illustrator because they identified his aptitude for capturing complex structures with accuracy. A medical illustrator held a life-saving purpose in documenting surgeries, anatomical details, and biological processes. He learned the intricate mechanics of the human body from the inside out. While in Germany he had the opportunity to study every aspect of traditional oil painting from surface preparation to the final varnish. Clinical accuracy and artistic sensibility would come to inform his unique portraiture style.

After the service he operated a portrait studio in St. Louis creating imagery inspired John Singer Sargent, but after a decade he felt creatively starved. It was there that he began the pivot “to fuse traditional techniques with the modern aesthetics of the social narrative.” While Sargent taught him formal structure, Charles White taught a portrait “is not merely a record of what someone looks like, but a testament to who they are within the larger social narrative.” Romare Bearden’s collage-like sensibility gave him “permission …. to show that our lived experience is often a beautiful, complex assembly of many different stories at once.”

For years, Ketchens noted that the story of the African diaspora was often treated as a footnote in American history. Once he began to depict with traditional oil painting technique the concept of Black history as an inseparable, foundational part of the history of the United States, he had arrived at his apex style we see today.

When he was commissioned by the Missouri History Museum to create four portraits honoring African American St. Louis civil rights leaders and activists for the exhibition “#1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis,” he ensured their likenesses weren’t just accurate but carried the weight of their specific struggle, to “paint the history they carry in their posture.”

Recently, The UN Council declared the Transatlantic slave trade was the gravest crime against humanity on an incomparable scale. He regards reparations through the lens of legacy and preservation. To ensure that the stories of the African diaspora are not just told today but are physically and educationally preserved in institutions for centuries requires dedicating resources to ensure those portraits remain as part of the museum’s permanent collection. “Reparations should look like the permanent, unwavering presence of our history in the American landscape.”