“Dis No Be Art”

Curatorial Approach and Motivations

Before delving into the discussion, let me first briefly deal with my overall curatorial approach and, second, highlight two critical points about what activated my passion for collecting popular media artifacts. With very few exceptions that I am aware of, the standard modes of exhibiting other visual arts in Ghana are profit motivated. My curatorial approach is different as it is not profit-oriented, but instead is geared toward educating various publics in Ghana. Regarding what drives my collection practice, the first reason relates to my research and teaching around popular culture in Ghana. Here, it is imperative for my students and all others, including my (academic) colleagues, to visually and physically engage with these artifacts firsthand, either within the university environment or in various off-campus exhibition spaces. Granted that some of these materials, such as vehicle inscriptions, death announcement posters, and shop signages are “everywhere” in Ghana, I find it essential to have a central location where visual samples of these works can be stored and accessed. With this mindset, I have complemented my physical collections with a public digital archive via my Instagram page: @ghanaian_popular_culture. Here, first, I curate and archive photographs that I have personally taken and those that I source from other locations and duly credit. Second, the page also archives short (tik-tok) videos on varying popular culture topics in Ghana.

Another important motivation for my collecting practice is to preserve these artifacts, as Ghana currently does not have a museum or gallery dedicated to these items. In doing so, an end goal is, indirectly, to help stimulate a positive sensitivity toward these formats as vital national resources worth preserving within academia and the wider public.

When I began scouting for locations to showcase some of my collections, it was apparent that gallery owners were enthusiastic about supporting me to stage exhibitions but could not do so because the works in my archives were not for sale. For example: in 2013, when I first approached Artist Alliance through its famous founder, Professor Ablade Glover, he was interested in lending me his gallery space to exhibit my collection of Ghanaian hand-painted movie posters (Figure 3). Professor Glover was keen because his gallery would have been the first in Ghana to have hosted such an event on the posters. All previous exhibitions of such posters had been held either in Europe, Australia, or the United States.⁴ However, because his space is a commercial gallery with no funds to support non-commercial shows, my exhibition could not be held there.

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Figure 3.

Mr. Awal Shetty’s “The Wolver[i]ne” (2013) poster painting. Photo by Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, 2022.

Thus, it was a great relief that, in 2014 and 2015, Alliance Française (Accra), a not-for-profit organization, agreed to sponsor my exhibitions. The sponsorship included providing rent-free gallery space as well as hosting audiences during the opening and closing nights. In my first exhibition at Alliance Française (March 20–April 23, 2014), I showcased the near-defunct practice of the art of the hand-painted movie posters that were prevalent from the late 1970s to the early 2000s (Elsas 2016; Wolfe 2001). Local movie theater owners used these posters, produced on recycled flour sacks, to advertise Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong movies to Ghanaian audiences. In organizing this event, one goal was to allow audiences to experience the very glocal nature of the posters in their orientation and practice. The glocal format of this art form, just like Hiplife music (Oduro-Frimpong 2009, 2021), lies in how the artists, utilizing recycled flour bags, employed their creative and imaginative talents to create a distinctly local Ghanaian visual art form. Another goal of the exhibition (which also strongly motivated my 2021 exhibition around the posters at the Nubuke Foundation) was to repudiate the lingering negative projection of the posters as a type of “deviant art” that was not part of the recognized canon of art. Such a perception is expressed in recent writing about the posters as “gaudy” (Brown 2016), “over the top” (Matteson 2019), “dazzlingly morbid [or] disturbing” (Ro 2019), “beautifully offputting” or descriptions of the posters as possessing “childlike innocence” (Mike 2020). Perhaps meant to exoticize the posters to boost sales in galleries in the United States and Europe, such epithets tap into long-standing racialized thinking that disaffirms “the social reality, creativity, and intellectual acuity” (Nzegwu 2019, 367) of the producers of this art form.

Exhibitions of other popular artforms, such as barbershop and beauty parlor signs, also took place at Alliance Française. For example, the show titled Married but Available (August 3–September 2, 2015) sought to create a positive aesthetic consciousness about these works by presenting them as visual art that should be considered as relevant works of art equal to work that conventionally has been included in the art canon (Figure 4). Perhaps in non-Ghanaian contexts such awareness might not be warranted, as some curators in the United States, for example, have routinely featured such formats in gallery exhibitions; however, I believe such understanding is crucial in Ghana. The key rationale is that this mindset can nurture a healthy respect for popular visual artists involved in such projects and begin to encourage Ghanaians to collect (and possibly preserve) these works for posterity. It is from this position that I continue to exhibit barbershop and beauty salon signs.

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Figure 4.

Heavy J’s “Say No To Brazillian Hair: …” featured in the exhibition titled Married but Available. Photo by Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, 2015.

A third significant rationale for presenting popular artworks was to reinforce the vision that these works are of substantial intellectual value. I do so through the exhibition statements and conversations I hold at such events. Here, I highlight how, for example, political cartoons and other satirical visual works like those produced by Bright Ackwerh, through their dynamic feature of humorous critique, allow political researchers to gain a more holistic understanding of politics on the ground. In addition, political cartoons, as an informal discourse, act as a sensing device that detects and allows us to apprehend “certain ground realities associated with a country’s current (social)-political dispositions” (Oduro-Frimpong 2018, 155). These works are a visual archive of Ghana’s history that can be critically analyzed to enhance our understanding of Ghanaian postcolonial culture. Finally, their pedagogical potential is demonstrated in the classroom where they may be used to clarify, challenge, and ground theoretical concepts, thereby contributing to efforts, for example, to de-Westernize or decolonize contemporary university teaching (Mbembe 2015). Overall, in holding these popular media art exhibitions, I am motivated by the urge to get audiences to begin to take these media formats and their creators seriously. Here, the goal is to nurture an appreciation for these artists as intelligent and authentic creatives whose work is equally innovative to that of recognized artists. In conversations with academic colleagues and students who visit my exhibitions at Ashesi University, we discuss how these popular artforms ground recent and nuanced discussions of “creativity” (Ingold and Hallam 2007; Svasek 2016) and what is “authentic/inauthentic” (van de Port and Meyer 2018).

Edem Yeboah’s wooden sculpture features a quotidian scene that one encounters in many urban centers in Ghana, where female hawkers converge to either relax or wait for work (Figure 2). In exhibiting this work, titled Kayaye, my goal was to initiate discussions around the entangled Akan philosophical notion and cultural practice of nyansa nni baakofo tirimu (“wisdom does not reside in only one person’s head”).⁵ In other words, I wanted audiences to visually experience and discuss the idea of different abilities, or in Gardner’s (2011) terms, varying bits of intelligence. This dynamic perspective of the mind acknowledges “many different and discrete facets of cognition, acknowledging that people have different cognitive strengths and contrastive cognitive styles” (Gardner 2006, 5). In this pursuit, my exhibition statement omitted Yeboah’s background information. This gap fostered discussions around where Yeboah was educated and learned to carve wood. Revealing Yeboah’s non-formal training generated fascinating conversations about his unique talent.