Introduction

The visual arts of Ghana have been the focus of a vital field of study for over sixty years. Since only a few articles dealing with visual art have appeared in Ghana Studies over the last twenty plus years, we thought it fitting to dedicate an issue of the journal to assessing how the visual arts of Ghana have been approached by scholars, art critics, and curators. We have given this thematic issue of Ghana Studies the title Looking Back, Looking Forward, which signals our interest in exploring where the field of Ghanaian visual art studies has been, where it is now, and where it might go in the future.

Prior to the late nineteenth century, information regarding material and visual culture is found primarily in the writings of Europeans visiting the Gold Coast. These include the descriptions of merchants dating as far back as the late fifteenth century; particularly rich are the many narratives of soldiers and correspondents involved in the Anglo-Asante wars of 1874, 1896, and 1900. The discipline of social anthropology produced a rich corpus of ethnographic analysis that presents valuable insights into the visual practices of various Ghanaian, especially Akan, communities. Particularly important was the trilogy of monographs produced by the British anthropologist, Robert S. Rattray (1923, 1927, 1929). It is not until the 1960s that the first books dedicated to Ghanaian visual art were published by the Ghanaian scholars Kofi Antubam (1963) and Alex Kyerematen (1964). Following these two pioneering studies and the contemporaneous establishment of the field of African art history, focused art historical analyses of the arts of Ghana began being published in the 1970s. A watershed event in the study of visual art was the exhibition, The Arts of Ghana organized by the Museum of Cultural History at UCLA. The book that accompanied the exhibition, authored by its curators, Herbert M. Cole and Doran H. Ross (1977), still stands as the most comprehensive survey of the visual arts of Ghana. Thus was born the field of Ghanaian art studies. Since then, a good deal of research and writing has been dedicated to the study of a remarkable array of visual practices found throughout Ghana; a trajectory that Nii Quarcoopome tracks in the lead essay in the present volume. In it, he argues that one of the important developments that the field has experienced over the past sixty years has been the expansion of the canon of Ghanaian art. Indeed, we used to speak only of “art;” now the field also embraces the broader and more inclusive moniker of “visual culture.”

Allison Martino and I decided it would be interesting to involve as many colleagues as possible in this project as a means for demonstrating the breadth and depth of scholarship on the visual arts of Ghana. We, therefore, invited colleagues to contribute short essays that offer snapshots of a wide array of subjects. Together, the articles presented here are intended to provide the reader with a sense of the vitality of the field of Ghanaian art and visual culture studies.

The collection of short essays opens with Nii Quarcoopome’s brief historiography of writing on the visual arts. This is followed by three articles written by “elders” in the field that offer their reflections on projects they pursued early in their careers. The first is an interview with Gilbert Amegatcher about his experiences as a student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in the early 1970s, and his first job working with the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. This is followed by the accounts of Herbert Cole and Malcolm McLeod, who discuss curating two seminal exhibitions and authoring companion monographs—respectively, The Arts of Ghana and Asante, Kingdom of Gold—that still stand, over forty years later, as the most comprehensive exhibitions interpreting the visual arts of Ghana.¹ The main section includes six articles that report on current research and reflect the ever-expanding breadth of the field, with articles dealing with visual performance, architecture, fashion, video film, and popular sign painting. It begins with Kwame Labi’s recent work on Fante asafo flag performance. Michelle Apotsos then reflects on the geopolitical implications of Ghana’s new national mosque in Accra. This is followed by two contributions that consider Ghanaian fashion: Christopher Richards documents an innovative commemorative cloth that pushes the conventional limits of textile design, and Suzanne Gott writes about the use of digital technologies in the fashion industry. Rebecca Ohene-Asah then reviews the recent emergence of Akan-language films as a strategy for challenging Nigerian dominance in the film industry. And finally, Joseph Oduro-Frimpong argues for the collecting and exhibiting of Ghanaian sign painting as a legitimate visual arts idiom. The final section considers the vital contemporary academic studio arts community in Ghana, beginning with a conversation with kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, the artist, critic, and educator who, with his colleagues at KNUST, has created a veritable crucible for creativity that is producing artists who are garnering international recognition. The vitality of the visual arts scene is further expressed in two reviews of recent exhibitions: one offered by Bernard Akoi-Jackson, who critiques the multimedia artist Frederick Ebenezer Okai’s show, Light Soup, and the other by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, commenting on Alhassan Issah’s, Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake. We conclude with a coda that offers a few reflections concerning the future, “new directions” for Ghanaian visual art studies.

Organizing this issue of Ghana Studies has afforded us an opportunity to recognize the contributions of two giants in the field of Ghanaian art who recently joined the ancestors: the artist/scholar Atta Kwami, and the curator/scholar Doran H. Ross. We dedicate this collection of essays to their memories. Atta Kwami (1956–2021) was first and foremost a prolific painter and printmaker (Figure 1). The son of one of Ghana’s most influential art educators, Grace Kwami, he, for many years, was a member of the Faculty of Arts at KNUST, where he taught painting and printmaking and developed his distinctive style of non-objective expression inspired by the visual and aural environments in which he lived and worked. By midcareer, he was recognized as one of Ghana’s leading artists, and was exhibiting not only in Ghana, but in Europe and the United States. His paintings and prints have been acquired by private collectors and museums around the world. Later in life, Atta pursued a PhD in art history, studying with John Picton at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.² His published dissertation, Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism (2013), is arguably the single most significant contribution to the literature on Ghanaian modern art.³ Doran Ross (1947–2020) was the preeminent scholar of the arts of the Akan for the better part of forty years (Figure 2). A prolific curator and author, he served as Deputy Director and Curator for Africa (1986–1996) and Director (1996–2001) of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, curating and/or managing no less than thirty-six exhibitions dealing with Africa or the African Diaspora. As noted above, early in his career, he co-curated The Arts of Ghana; perhaps his most important exhibition was Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity that opened at the Fowler Museum in 1998 which, like many of the exhibitions he curated, was accompanied by an impressive monograph, the definitive work on the well-known textile tradition (Ross 1998). His scholarly writing focused on Akan political regalia and the arts of Fante asafo companies, especially their distinctive appliqué flags and posuban (cement shrines). In addition to his many articles and contributions to edited volumes, he authored several collections-based books analyzing the sumptuous gold regalia of the Akan.⁴ Though these cherished friends and colleagues will be missed, their formidable presence will live on in their important contributions to the making and study of Ghanaian visual art.

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Figure 1.

Atta Kwami standing in front of a Robert Motherwell painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo by Raymond Silverman, 2011.

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Figure 2.

Doran Ross on the roof of a Nankane compound, Sirigu, Ghana. Photo by Herbert M. Cole, 1975.