An African American art collector invites us home
November 19: Little Rock, Arkansas. The city of the Clintons, surrounded by water and forests, with friendly neighborhoods abound. Also home to a great Czech restaurant and a unique African American Art collection. Not that we could know … we found out because we were personally invited to the collector’s house.
“Ma’am, ma’am, where are you from?” A man calls out from two tables away. We are at a Czech restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas. We’re only here because it popped up on Google Maps with a 4.7-star rating. I’m about to bite into a grilled cheese sandwich with sauerkraut. I’m feeling home, which is funny considering I only ever made a few weekend trips to Prague. But it’s Europe, after all. From a US perspective it’s around the corner.
After telling our fellow diner where I’m from, he says: “Ah, I thought you weren’t from here. You’ve got a different constitution.” Still not blending in, apparently. I’m not sure whether he figured out my otherness by my height, but I suspect it could be just about anything. How is it that Americans are so skilled at small talk? I’m thinking. The conversations just flow – their part of the conversation at least.
We tell him about our cross-country road trip, which gets him started about his own travels. He tells tales of his trips to West Africa and Uganda. We find out he’s a doctor who is originally from California. We got ourselves a storyteller here. He impresses me because he openly, boldly speaks about a wide range of issues, not shying away from politics or even race, seated there in that Little Rock restaurant. In a matter of minutes he covers the interconnectedness of race, wealth, the history of slavery and the demographics of US cities. “The US is one big social experiment, this country is only a few hundred years old!” An interesting perspective.
We are about to order the cheesecake the restaurant is famous for (I’d been eyeing the triple stack of “chocolate salami” dessert on his grandson’s plate), when he stands up to leave. And just like that, he pays our bill and invites us over for a cup of coffee at his house. Wait – what? Does this kind of hospitality still exist nowadays?! We order, review, or swipe, we leave absolutely nothing to chance. To put it bluntly (a Dutch speciality), spontaneity is dead. Black Mirror has nothing on reality. So I – lover of the unexpected – was jumping up and down when he invited us over to his house to come see his art collection. Figuratively speaking, as the boyfriend told me to keep it cool.
We follow his car through the beautiful autumn-colored, tree-lined streets of Little Rock’s suburbia. We pull up to a house that could easily pass for civic hall – it’s huge. I never understood why you would want to have such a mansion for a home. But here? Everything clicks. Entering the front door is like entering a little slice of heaven. The sun shines through the many windows in the tea room. The space is bright, grand, yet warm. And then there’s the art, everywhere you look. It’s a unique African American art collection of astonishing statues and paintings, every piece handpicked. In this house, they get the space they deserve, to be admired.
I follow him up the kind of stairs I’ve only ever seen in movies. The sound of music-like, but this one runs not on one, but two sides of the space. Stairs for royalty and superstars. But it doesn’t compare to what’s upstairs. We take another set of stairs and end up in an acclimatized room. It’s a special collection from the 1800s and early 1900s. The paintings, including the frames, look exactly like the ones my grandparents have on their wall (landscape paintings they inherited from their parents, which must be from around the same period). With a small but mighty difference: these paintings are from African American artists, who painted at a time when slavery was still legal. Being in that room the weight of that history is palpable.
There are some easels in the space, too. Instead of paper, they have what appears to be glass plates on them, with a partially finished face. Yet it feels like the man staring back at me from this unfinished artwork is alive. Oh, it’s good! He looks so real he almost makes me blush – this handsome figure.
It turns out our host and his wife – a famous model for Dove – are art collectors. They also mentor and host artists in their home, an explanation for the studio upstairs, used by their current art fellow. They are regularly invited to wine and dine with the wealthy and the famous. They’re also self-appointed ambassadors for Little Rock Arkansas. It’s so nice not to know these kind of details in advance but to slowly figure them out during a conversation. It’s not an ‘experience’ we bought from a local ‘host’ (although I tend to love these too!), it is, simply, spontaneous.
It’s not just the art collection that impresses me. It’s the trust and ease with which he invited us into his home. Ambassador-mission for Little Rock accomplished, because as we sit down for dinner a few days later, reflecting on the first half of our cross-country trip, Little Rock unanimously comes out on top for “most unexpected place”. Thank you for the incredibly warm welcome, Archie.
Still thinking about that cheesecake though. 😉