ABSTRACT:
Artist-intellectual, poet, mathematician, and educator, kąrî’kạchä seid’ou reflects upon the experiences and thinking that have informed his innovative and revolutionary work as an artist, educator, and social activist. His efforts over the last thirty years have been instrumental in transforming the visual arts in Ghana, creating a crucible for creativity that is unprecedented on the African continent.
The following is an abridged and edited version of the transcript from a discussion between kąrî’kạchä seid’ou and Raymond Silverman that took place in April 2022. It presents seid’ou’s reflections on the experiences and thinking that have shaped his revolutionary collaborative art making and pedagogical practice. His efforts have transformed the curricula of Ghana’s preeminent art school at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), where he and his colleagues have created an environment that has produced a generation of innovative artists, many of whom are exhibiting not only in Ghana, but at premier international venues.
Raymond Silverman (RS): kąrî, can you tell me a bit about yourself? When and how did you become interested in art? Where did you study? How would you describe your own art practice? When did you become interested in art and art pedagogy?
kąrî’kạchä seid’ou (ks): My art practice goes back to my childhood, but I don’t know where it comes from. I am the first in my family to be interested in art in the way we know it now. In my teens, I was a commercial sign painter, like Almighty God, Kwame Akoto, before going to art school.1 I worked with a master sign painter named Samuel Adu, at HODEP Art Studio at the Madina Old Road Lorry Station, Accra. In addition to taking jobs in sign writing, illustration, screen printing and hoarding, there was a remarkable portraiture tradition at HODEP. A typical workday involved multimedia practices that included painting, of course, but also constructing things, integrating lights, sound, and such. I often found myself standing on the bonnet of a mammy truck and decorating freehand on the wooden arch. We improvised a lot, often working in public while spectators or clients passed by or watched in real time like a live performance. Some forms of historical African art have this performative quality and it resonates in some of my later work (Figure 1).
Figure 1.kąrî’kạchä seid’ou (then Edward [Kevin] Amankwah), KNUST Royal Palm Project, KNUST. Painting performance involving 68 trees, social practice, and institutional critique. Photo by Atta Kwami, 1996.
ks: I had this experience before going to the art school at KNUST in 1989. You can imagine going to the Academy, where all you had to do was paint or draw on a sheet of paper or canvas that was the same size and quality for everybody. My previous experience on the street was quite contrary to what I experienced at the university, though the university did shape the analytic part of studying art, like analyzing color, form, and pictorial structure.2 So, overall, my training consisted of entrepreneurial and improvisatory work on the street, working in immersive situations in public spaces, and later, at KNUST, a more non-commercial and cerebral study of painting in the Ghanaian Pictorial Modernist tradition. Both were important in shaping my practice as both an artist and teacher.
RS: So, I imagine that you may have been a little different than your teachers and most of the other students at KNUST?
ks: Indeed! The breadth of my experience and the expanded view of art that I developed didn’t conform with what was expected of an artist in Ghana in the early 1990s, especially exhibiting artists with academy training who aspired to connect to the international Modernist art world. I introduced performance art, social practice, and other dematerialized practices into the Ghanaian canon in the early 1990s. Particularly, my performances, tactical pedagogy, and non-proprietary projects were very subtle. I used to work them into institutional regimes and policies in very delicate and ironic ways. I repurposed public events and bureaucratic apparatuses of academic and state institutions as tactical media. By default, people performing their official or routine tasks in these events and environments became unsolicited participants in my performances (Figure 2). Most of my work was ephemeral or durational. None of the galleries or museums at the time were prepared for that. In effect, my practice was dismissed as a Western construct, but in fact it was the opposite! My sources were very African.3
Figure 2.kąrî’kạchä seid’ou (then Edward [Kevin] Amankwah, in pseudo-Arabian garb). Scenes from guerrilla performance at the 28th Annual Congregation Ceremony, February 1994, KNUST. Among seid’ou’s unsolicited co-performers are Mr. Louis Casely Hayford, the then Chairman of University Council (bottom left) and Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, the then King of Ashanti (right). Photos by kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, 1994.
RS: Did that present some challenges for you in terms of the people who you were working with at KNUST?
ks: Yes. It also was heightened because when I studied painting and sculpture—I was a painting major and sculpture minor—I excelled in the Pictorial-Modernist tradition that was haloed at the time and was expected to follow in the footsteps of the greats, like Ablade Glover and Ato Delaquis and Co. But by the time I completed my undergraduate studies my practice was more open, more expansive. I was no longer making autonomous and medium-specific paintings. That intensified the disappointment of colleagues and connoisseurs about my practice. When my work became much more deskilled, dematerialized, and performative, I had a lot of trouble. The only teacher of the older generation who showed some sympathy for what I was doing was Atta Kwami. Also, with the support of like-minded peers, I pushed against the hegemony of the art world in Ghana at the time. I was seeking a more democratic, a more inclusive art practice and ideological space, but that was not the case, in school and outside, in galleries and museums. I was a loner until the millennial generation took my work and thinking as their key inspiration.
RS: For the last 20 years, you and a growing number of artists have led a revolution of sorts and opened new spaces for art, first at KNUST and now throughout the country. You struggled as a student, but you emerged from that and were able to develop your own practice, and then came back into that academic setting where you’ve created a very different environment for learning about and practicing art.
ks: Yes, I am grateful to my blaxTARLINES colleagues, students, and partners. Together, we’ve managed to create a more expansive, more inclusive environment for making art.4 There are practices that would never have come naturally into the exhibition canon of Ghanaian art. Painting was the default, the king or queen of the arts. Establishing an open space where no medium, format, or subject has been consecrated made it possible for women and other cultural and class minorities to participate meaningfully in a practice that was silently governed by systemic exclusions, discrimination, or repression.
RS: Were there other things going that you had to deal with to pursue your mission to democratize art-making in Ghana?
ks: Yes. Back when I was a student, art history was consigned to so-called “tribal art”; there was not much written about the work of living artists. There was little knowledge of the sources of what we were doing and why we were doing it. We had to create an environment for understanding the art of previous generations and interrogating the art that we were making. That’s one of the reasons why my PhD thesis took the form that it did.5 I had to pile up a lot of archival material! In fact, I was not interested in writing about the history of studio practice in Ghana, but I knew it was very important. It’s very difficult to piece together a story about Ghana’s modern art history. We had to reconstruct it. We also had to find ways to build infrastructure and new sorts of start-up spaces for exhibitions, for hosting international events, publications, and all that—a whole lot. That, in fact, is what is behind Ibrahim Mahama’s SCCA and its cognates, Red Clay, and Nkrumah Voli-ni.6 We now have a growing number of collectives, residencies, and art spaces: for instance there is a residency in Kumasi called pIAR, led by the gender-bending artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, that is attracting a lot of visitors from all over the world.7 Others have established alternative spaces and collectives in different places, and hopefully within the next 10 years or so Ghana’s infrastructure for art will have changed dramatically.
RS: I think it already has changed dramatically. It can change more, of course, but one of the things that I so admire about how you approach this is that you have made this tremendous effort to get a sense of where you came from as an artist in terms of going back and seeking a history of art in Ghana. You described a situation that you were pushing against as a student, but you felt it was important to seek the origins of that position as a requisite for moving forward.
ks: Yes, yes, it’s very important. For me it’s not a mutually exclusive thing. You have to study all the situations and be well-grounded to be able to effect change.
RS: And you know, kąrî, there’s another important dimension to what you’ve been doing. Another thing that I believe was totally absent in Ghana until the last 20 years or so is any kind of critical discourse concerning visual art—art criticism. People [are] writing about art, thinking about art, in a more public context. There are a good number of people in Ghana who are writing with great insight about what’s going on in the art world. Indeed, there are a couple of thoughtful exhibition reviews included in this issue of Ghana Studies.
ks: Yes, it’s true. We had to work on it purposefully, and we are still working on it because it could be better. I remember that Atta Kwami wrote an article about this exhibition in the Ghana Museum, South Meets West, in which he had participated. He was very disappointed with the reviews of the exhibition that appeared in the newspaper. So, he wrote an article in which he complained about how the journalists simply lifted portions of the exhibition text and pasted them in their articles.8 That was the quality at the time, at the turn of the century. So, the change you’re talking about is really as late as this century. And we had to work on it silently and strategically, through modifications of the curriculum to include curatorial and writing labs and tactical mobilization of different ambitions from inside and outside the art field.
RS: Since you’ve mentioned him a couple times, as you know, we’re dedicating this issue of the Ghana Studies to the memory of Atta Kwami. I wonder if you might talk a bit more about what you see as his contribution to the arts of Ghana.
ks: The first contribution I might mention is drawing attention to the importance of documentation and archiving. That was rare in the Ghanaian art scene. Atta was an artist who was not only interested in making art, but also in documenting what others were doing, through many means—photographing the work of other artists, getting actual texts, and also visiting libraries whenever he traveled to retrieve documents that are connected to Ghanaian art.
ks: Another contribution is present in his painting. Atta Kwami initiated a new conversation on the structure of painting. His paintings may be described as abstract, or non-objective, but they were referential at the same time. This reminds me of what some of the Black abstract painters such as Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, and Jack Whitten were doing. Even though their paintings look abstract and seem to respond to formal issues, they were also associated with civil rights, jazz, and other social and political phenomena of the time. So, they were in between, and I recall some of the challenges they faced regarding their reception in either Black America or by the white-cast school of formalist abstraction. Atta’s reception was similarly sandwiched. However, he had much more significance abroad than at home. Meanwhile, he had initiated new conversations about art. Atta commented on how the realist imaginary, as well as the structure of paintings, corresponded to the structure of cultures as manifested in the music, textiles, and colors of the city. Through the idiom of abstraction, he managed to liberate Ghana’s modern painting from that stranglehold of “area studies.”
RS: I knew Atta quite well and had many conversations with him. We brought him to Michigan for an artist’s residency and gave him an exhibition here.9 I know how frustrated he was with the Art Faculty at KNUST, for the same reasons that you were talking about. It was very conservative and narrowly focused. That situation served as an impetus to him, driving him to do some of the most important things associated with his own painting, but also pushing him to write about art. His Kumasi Realism is a critical text (Kwami 2013). Like some of the work you’ve been doing, he sought an understanding of an art environment in a historical context.
ks: Indeed. He also made a significant contribution to printmaking practices at KNUST, extending the printmaking tradition in the school, which had been established during colonial times by the likes of Albert Mawere Opoku and was continued into the 1980s and 1990s by artists like Frederick Tete Mate. Mate taught my class printmaking before Atta Kwami took over. Mate was very experimental. Though he was immersed in conventional approaches to printmaking, he also encouraged us to use ropes, clay, Ghanaian root crops, and other unorthodox means to make prints. Atta Kwami was the next mentor who pushed printmaking even further.
RS: No doubt Atta’s wife, Pamela [Clarkson] also contributed.
ks: Yes, I was in school when Pamela arrived, and she collaborated with him to teach our class in papermaking and all that. Atta was already improvising ways of printing prior to Pamela coming. But Pamela brought a certain degree of professionalism to the teaching of printmaking.
ks: The last thing I’ll mention regarding Atta is his persistent effort to canonize artists who were outside the Ghanaian art historical mainstream. One of them was his mother, Grace Kwami, an artist and educator. Indeed, Kofi Antubam (1963, 208) mentioned Grace Kwami in his book, Ghana’s Heritage of Culture, referencing the amazing terracotta figures she was making in the 1960s. However, it was Atta who used a variety of means to keep her memory alive. In doing so, he joined the efforts of Mrs. Frances Ademola (the Loom Gallery), and a few others who brought attention to the need to revise the Ghanaian Modernist canon to include the work of women artists who have been overlooked.
RS: Yes. Grace Kwami played a vital role, particularly in arts education in Ghana.
ks: Yes, she taught a number of Ghana’s most significant artists and art teachers of the twentieth century.
RS: If we might turn briefly to another topic. I am interested in an issue that we touched upon earlier, the distinction made by both artists and those who write about art between historical tradition-based art and contemporary studio-based art. I find this divisive paradigm problematic, as the evidence suggests that one informs the other—the past is always in dialogue with the present. What are your thoughts regarding the relationship between these two arenas of practice and discourse?
ks: I think this false dichotomy is principally the legacy of the “Primitivist” and “World Art” discourse complementary to Euro-American Modernism, colonialism and corresponding museum cultures.10 But the postcolonial and transnational currents of global contemporary art, from Magiciens de la Terre (1989) through NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sidney (2020), have demonstrated that such binaries are unwarranted.11 If you consider that the idea of “contemporaneity” in “contemporary art” could mean “to be with something in time” then the past, future, and present can all co-exist in the same matrix. Culturally, “contemporaneity” could also mean connecting the local with the global. Even present-day technologies make this multiplicity of temporalities and geographies more feasible. In the blaxTARLINES community, the reality is that artists’ references are heterodox, and they combine experiences from both local and global currents, some visual, some performative, some very conceptual—many with influences from indigenous arts and aboriginal and international knowledge systems. For instance, one of my PhD students, Frederick Ebenezer Okai, is doing amazing work by studying indigenous traditions of pottery and using knowledge gained from the communities of women potters to develop large scale pottery, multi-media installations, and community projects. Also, Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson’s work post-produces dishes from indigenous Ghanaian cuisine such as tuo zaafi, waakye, gari, fufu and so forth (Figure 3).12 So, a lot is happening today that sees no divide between historical or tradition-based practices and recent art practices in the contemporary art framework, yet they are likely to be overlooked because of the enduring fixation on the false binary.
Figure 3.Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson. Purple Flows, 2022. Installation shot, “Existing Otherwise,” Red Clay, Tamale. Ingredients: “Tuo Zaafi” (fermented corn and millet flour), “Tom Brown” (roasted corn flour), Wheat flour and “Gari” (grated cassava grains). 1,000 kg. “Gari” supplied by Ghatty Foods Company, Accra. Hanging piece, 25m × 6m. Photo by Elolo Bosoka, 2022.
RS: What you’re saying makes so much sense. I have for many years talked with my students about something that I refer to as the tyranny of categories. We feel compelled to create categories, containers if you will, in which to organize our knowledge, our experiences. And people have a notion that the walls of such containers are not permeable, that nothing can pass through them. But in fact, things do.
ks: Exactly. But the global contemporary art framework also has its own failings, which we attempt to address in the practices issuing from the blaxTARLINES community. One of the failings is that it has been integrated seamlessly into the Neo-liberal market logic such that art typically is found in cities where capitalist markets thrive. Vast regions and populations that are unfortunate enough to fall outside this mainstream are written out of its history. Despite offering this more democratic and inclusive ideological space in principle, contemporary art fails in its egalitarian commitment to making art “global” because of its skewed forms of access and infrastructure distribution. This makes the open-source interventions of blaxTARLINES and the “resource repatriation” initiatives of Ibrahim Mahama, El Anatsui and sundry others ameliorative for excluded spaces and creative communities, especially those on the African continent.
RS: I have one last question I want to ask, kąrî. Where do you see visual arts in Ghana going in the future?
ks: It will go in many directions. Repatriated capital, their complementary art markets, and their new social networks and institutional arrangements seem to be driving the work of some artists on the African continent into significance. I see a number of galleries, art fairs, and collector bases springing up. I can see entrepreneurial forms of art practice becoming very significant in the next five years or more. See what is happening with the work of Amoako Boafo and especially the artists trained at Ghanatta College of Art and Design, who are inspired by his work, and the Black figure traditions of Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and others. I don’t know how long this genre is going to continue to appeal to collectors and patrons after Black Lives Matter, but I’m hoping there will be some spin-offs that will lead to something more significant. Ghana might be leading in this new drive now, along with Nigeria, and I can already see more women artists like Afia Prempeh and Theresa Ankomah being inspired to take art in various media in new directions. One of our challenges, however, is that now galleries and collectors are only looking at paintings. And I’m only seeing paintings of a certain kind. But I’m also hoping that, with time, maybe artists will find other means of articulation. I’m also hoping that there are artists who may experiment with modes of expression that may not necessarily appeal to existing markets but rather will create new forms of support, patronage, and markets. Because considerable investment is needed to support the making of art for which there is no existing market, we need to find the means to establish new spaces and support systems for such art and artists. At the moment, there are only few spaces here in Ghana that support this kind of work. It is not easy to fund a project on the scale that Ibrahim [Mahama] is doing in Tamale. It is very capital intensive. But he has demonstrated that it is not impossible.
RS: This is one of the things we discussed when Ibrahim was here at the University of Michigan a few years ago. I find it so admirable that here’s this guy who is landing these incredible commissions in Europe and North America for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is not going off and buying Mercedes Benz vehicles! Instead, Ibrahim is investing the money in building the SCCA and Red Clay, this vital community for the arts in Tamale. I think this is what you’re talking about. There need to be more spaces like that.
ks: Yes, for sure. His open-source initiative is serving as a catalyst for the social and economic development of Tamale. I foresee a time when Tamale has its own international airport so that you can fly straight from anywhere to Tamale without having to touch down in Accra. It’s going to be another center in which to experience art of a distinctive kind. So, there’s going to be diversity, that’s what I see in Ghana in the future. blaxTARLINES may die as a parent, but it would have given birth to these new spaces all over the country and beyond—like the great circle with boundaries nowhere but centers everywhere.
RS: Of course. Everything comes to an end eventually, but it provides a foundation for the future.
Footnotes
↵1. Kwame Akoto is the principal artist in the Almighty God workshop, one of Ghana’s best-known sign painting studios, located in Kumasi.
↵2. The foundation course of KNUST College of Art followed a British adaptation of the Bauhaus curriculum recommended in the First Coldstream Report (1960).
↵3. An important inspiration in the mid-1990s was Laboratoire Agit’Art. Through the publications that accompanied documenta 11, a group exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor in 2002, kąrî’kạchä seid’ou was made aware of the affinities between his work and that of Huit Facettes and Le Groupe Amos.
↵4. blaxTARLINES is an open-source art collective inspired by the non-proprietary art practice and pedagogical projects of kąrî’kạchä seid’ou. Key figures include Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, George Ampratwum, Dorothy Amenuke, Edwin Bodjawah, Bernard Akoi- Jackson, Ibrahim Mahama, Agyeman “Dota” Ossei, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Robin Riskin, and Adjo Kisser. A recent issue of the journal African Arts edited by Ruth Simbao and Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu (2021) explores the work of blaxTARLINES.
↵5. The thesis (seid’ou 2006) won the 2008 Silver Award of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences for the humanities. The Silver Award is the Academy’s top award for unpublished graduate thesis manuscripts. See https://gaas-gh.org/fellowship/prizes-and-awards/gaas-awards/.
↵6. The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), established by Ibrahim Mahama, is an artist-run project space, exhibition and research hub, cultural repository, and site for artists’ residencies located in Tamale that is dedicated to art and cultural practices that emerged in the 20th century. See https://www.sccatamale.org/.
↵7. perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR) is an interdisciplinary artists’ program and a performance hatchery hosted by crazinisT artisT studiO in Kumasi. See https://crazinistartist.com/piar-artist-in-residency/.
↵8. See Kwami 2000.
↵9. The exhibition, Susuka: Paintings and Prints, was installed in GalleryDAAS at the University of Michigan from January 20 to February 25, 2011.
↵10. A prime example of this binary is the MoMA exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984) in which the “tribal” art of Africa, Oceania and North America is “ancestral” and extinct while Euro-American Modern Art is “recent” and in progress. Also, see Hans Belting’s (2013) critique of “World Art” as art in ethnographic museums distinct from Modern Art in art museums.
↵11. The terms “global art” and “contemporary art” are synonymous. See Hans Belting’s “Contemporary Art as Global Art. A Critical Estimate” (2009).
↵12. Tuo zaafi is made from fermented millet and corn flour. Waakye is rice and beans boiled with sorghum leaves and eaten with chili hot sauce. Gari is a grainy dish made from grated and fermented cassava. Fufu is a dough-like food made from boiled and pounded chunks of cassava and plantain and eaten with vegetable soup.
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