Newsroom: Columbus Museum of Art presents “Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community” opening October 6, 2023
The group exhibition celebrates contemporary artists with connections to Accra, Ghana, Columbus, Ohio’s sister city
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Thursday, September 7, 2023 — The Columbus Museum of Art(CMA) is pleased to present Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community, a multigenerational group exhibition showcasing 18 emerging and mid-career artists with deep connections to Accra, Ghana, whose practices challenge and redefine traditional art historical narratives. On view at the Museum from October 6, 2023–January 28, 2024, this exhibition is organized by guest curators Edmund Gaisie and Rebecca Ibel, in partnership with Deidre Hamlar, Curator at Large at CMA.
Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community surveys the increasingly visible impact Ghanaian artists have had on global art discourse, including the rise of the ‘Ghana School,’ which has emerged over the past five years as an influential group of artists reshaping the contemporary art landscape. Spanning nearly 30 works, the featured artists leverage various mediums and representational strategies, manipulating form, image, and iconography in an invitation for viewers to engage with new perspectives. The exhibition features artists connected to the nation’s capital by birth, heritage or personal history.
“We’re excited to introduce our community to both younger and more established names from the Ghana School,” said Hamlar. “By pairing internationally renowned artists with lesser known visionaries, we hope this exhibition can contribute to a fuller picture of artmaking from the region, as well as spotlight some of the intergenerational conversations forged by the works on view.”
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Portraiture dominates the exhibition, addressing body politics, racial identity, and complexities of human expression in the empowering figuration of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and the melanin-centric subjects of Kwesi Botchway. Tactile approaches result in emotive tableaus, spanning Amoako Boafo’s celebrated finger-painting technique and Adjei Tawiah’s incorporation of kotsa, a nylon sponge material used in Ghanaian funerary bathing practices.
Patrick Quarm and Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh expand on representational painting traditions as Quarm addresses a hybrid cultural experience and identity, incorporating friends and family in his work, layering African fabrics and American settings, while Mexico City-based Tetteh draws on his Ghanaian roots and instills a Surrealist style into his paintings, intertwining personal and futuristic mythologies.
Materiality is an origin point for several artists’ investigations into modern consumerism, environmental concerns, and colonial legacies, including Rufai Zakari’s cutting and stitching of recycled plastics to render depictions of community members, and the tapestries of El Anatsui woven with metallic detritus. In Serge Attukwei Clottey’s conceptual framework of Afrogallonism, Clottey takes up plastic oil containers — used for water collection amidst Accra’s frequent water shortages, then becoming pollutants once discarded — in reflection of interlocking environmental challenges impacting modern life.
Araba Opoku’s and Zohra Opoku’s respective practices are critical voices in the Ghana School, which see less parity in its success stories of women artists compared to their male counterparts. Araba Opoku’s fluid, abstract paintings seep into the boundaries of the figuration-dominated canon of the Ghana School, calling forth dimensional fields of color and shape. With a background in fashion, Zohra Opoku balances silk screen, weaving, collage, and photography, resulting in works both external and autobiographical, exploring identity formation in the backdrop of political and socio-economic evolutions.
Investigations into representation, embodiment, and subjecthood are also particularly poignant in the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Adelaide Damoah, both artists based in London and of Ghanaian descent. Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings of fictional Black figures invite a reflexive relationship with the viewer’s imagination, as Damoah combines performance and painting to explore colonialism, identity, sexuality, and spirituality, using her body as a paintbrush to create impressions directly onto the surface.
Several works bring forth the dynamism of Ghanaian culture and history — through his luminous documentary photography, Paul Ninson depicts Asante customs, and Gideon Appah’s dreamlike, atmospheric paintings draw from influences spanning archival imagery, personal mythology, and the Ghanaian landscape. Among the forefathers of the exhibition is Paa Joe, a leader in the Ghanaian tradition of sculptural fantasy coffins known as abebuu adekai, presenting a series of architectural models of Gold Coast castles and forts that served as way stations for more than six million Africans sold into slavery.
Other artists respond to cross-continental influences within their practices, such as Kenturah Davis and Derek Fordjour, two American artists with close connections to Ghana. Davis divides her time between Los Angeles and the Aburi Mountains and incorporates references from each cultural source into her work. Fordjour, born and raised in Memphis to Ghanaian parents, works in form and content reflective of both American culture and Ghanaian ancestry.
As exemplified through the works of Davis and Fordjour, a confluence of continental African and African American cultures is of particular interest as Columbus, Ohio and Accra, Ghana were established as “sister cities” in 2015, with a commitment to economic, educational, and cultural partnerships. In this spirit, curators Rebecca Ibel and Edmund Gaisie conceived Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community as the latest initiative celebrating Ghanaian artistry and the heritage of Columbus’ vibrant Ghanaian community. On the heels of this year’s inaugural Ohio GhanaFest, Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community, provides a poignant springboard for further opportunities for artistic dialogue and exchange.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with an essay by DK Nnuro, writer and Curator of Special Projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art.
