Today I am posting this photo.
- Avery Brown Renfro
- May 11
- 2 min read
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I hope everyone had a beautiful day filled with love, reflection, and connection.
Today I am posting this photo.
Baby Avery sitting on my mother’s lap opening gifts at my very first at home birthday party beneath a painting by my grandfather, Professor Leon Renfro.
In the painting above us is my father as a child at his own birthday party.
Three generations held inside one moment. And none of us could have imagined what this picture would eventually mean.
At the time, I was just a little girl sitting with my mom beneath a painting hanging on the wall. Today, I am an African American Studies graduate working to preserve, study, and carry forward my grandfather’s artistic legacy through Brown Renfro.
How surreal it feels. And maybe that is fitting because surrealism lived inside his work.
At first glance, this painting may look like an ordinary family scene, but when you begin studying the details, another layer begins to appear. The exaggerated ears, the expressions, the proportions, the emotional undertones, the symbolism hidden quietly inside the image. His work always carried deeper conversations beneath the surface.
My grandfather created art that asked people to look again.
And now, years later, I find myself looking again too. Not only at the artwork, but at the photographs, the memories, the lineage, and the women helping carry this story forward.
Professor Leon Renfro was my father’s father, but today my mother is also helping me carry this legacy as part of the Brown Renfro team through the marketing, aesthetics, and vision surrounding this exhibition.
Looking at my mother in this photo with her beautiful afro holding me beneath this painting makes me think about how mothers preserve legacy in ways we do not always recognize in real time. Sometimes they preserve history simply by protecting the space where memory can survive long enough to be rediscovered.
To all mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and women carrying stories, culture, creativity, softness, protection, and history through generations, thank you.
This work feels bigger than art on walls now.
It feels like memory.It feels like bloodline.
It feels like carrying something forward that was waiting to be seen again.
We don’t just hang the art. We carry it on.
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