Art is like music,” says Emmanuel Taku. “When you listen to sad music, you might become sad. Listen to joyful music, you might become happy.”
The Ghanaian painter is reflecting on being a purveyor of joy through his work. His portraits’ bonhomie is contagious, as if one is keeping company with Taku’s high-spirited subjects. They are dressed, inevitably, in flamboyant garb—a Taku signature. And they’re enjoying themselves as they go about their daily lives; more precisely, Taku’s people embody the spirit of enjoyment, of embracing life with a smile, whatever their travails. It’s a kind of superpower. Indeed, Taku’s Instagram bio describes him as a “creator of deities.” Over a decade, he’s assembled a pantheon of such divinities, demigods of fun.
Taku’s work is distinctive, but in its life-embracing quality, it’s also of a piece with the generation of painters who have emerged from Ghana in the past few years. Other buzzed-about names of this ‘Ghana School’ include Amoako Boafo, Joshua OhenebaTakyi, Afia Prempeh, Gideon Appah, Cornelius Annor, Ebenezer Nana Bruce and Kwesi Botchway. Together, their oeuvres, with a shared emphasis on vibrant landscapes and loving depictions of everyday people and everyday occurrences in the country, have helped make Accra, Ghana’s beachside capital, into a cultural hotspot.
Collectors and curators worldwide are taking notice. Boafo staged his first New York City solo exhibition at Gagosian this spring; Appah made his London debut around the same time, taking over the whole of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery with his show “How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights.” In early October, all the way over in Ohio, in America’s Midwestern heartland, the Columbus Museum of Art opened “Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community.” Later that month, numerous works by Ghanaian painters made their way into Maruani Mercier’s monumental “Filling in the Pieces in Black,” curated by Britain’s multi-hyphenate cultural influencer June Sarpong, and staged simultaneously at the gallery’s flagship space in Brussels and at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
“What I think is so interesting about this whole generation of mainly male Ghanaian artists—the women are just now coming forward—is their unapologetic celebration of Blackness and the Black form,” says Sarpong. “The energy of that community, it’s really positive, and maybe for that reason, you just don’t get the kind of sorrow you see from so many other Black artists, especially from the diaspora. Their subjects all have a certain quiet confidence.”
Richmond Orlando Mensah, founder of Accra-based arts publication, Manju Journal and author of the recently released “Voices: Ghana’s Artists in Their Own Words,” notes that the current cultural efflorescence has been aided by institutions such as the Nubuke Foundation, a nonprofit with space set aside for local creatives to learn, gather, and show their work, and Gallery 1957, Accra’s pre-eminent gallery and, for many of these artists, a launchpad onto the international arts scene.
“The collector community, in the past five years or so, they’ve awakened to the talent in Ghana, and they’re excited about diversifying their collections beyond work by white artists,” says Maruani Mercier director Laurent Mercier. It helps that these painters are fluent in the visual languages of occidental art, he notes, but they’ve made those languages their own by marrying them to a tradition of African portraiture. “In some ways, what they’re doing is filling in a missing history,” Mercier says. “You can see it in the brushstroke: The artists look back at photos of their families, and you have to understand, Kodak film was developed to represent white skin, and in these photographs, the Black skin looks very flat; in response, in Botchway’s work, for example, you find this very careful attention to the nuance of skin tone.” Strokes of purple, Mercier adds, are there not just for shading, but to convey a message: Purple is the color of royalty, after all.
One source of this river of creativity can be traced to the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, founded in 1969. Taku, Boafo, Nana Bruce, and Botchway are a few of its star alumni, and the latter is expanding on the school’s mission to foster a community of artists in Ghana. Botchway’s studio is headquartered at Worldfaze, a complex of purple-painted buildings in Accra’s busy Ogbojo area where he has established an artists’ residency program, with the aim of fostering young talent. We have to build a foundation to support the artists who are coming up,” notes Botchway, 29, who perceives his growing renown as a blessing to be handed down. “What we want is a sustainable art ecosystem—a continuing practice of artists engaging with one another, and with the community as a whole.” There are two studios at Worldfaze, one for the artists in residence, who rotate in and out, and one for Botchway, and the proximity isn’t incidental: You can see Worldfaze as the continuation of the project of Botchway’s paintings, which is to uplift Black experience and place it in the limelight with all its beauty, color and complexity. He wants, he says, “to inspire people to live life at their best.”
“To let them know that everything is OK, even when everything is not OK,” he continues. “You need to be able to make yourself happy.” One way Botchway’s subjects do that is by adorning themselves—in sequined dresses, vividly patterned headwraps, pop-colored tailoring. It’s fashion as an assertion of life force, of potency. Of agency. Frequently, the people in Botchway’s portraits regard the viewer with a sly smile on their face. You look at them—and they look right back.
About twenty minutes’ drive from Worldfaze lies Oswald House, a shopping mall/office building that also hosts young artist Joshua Oheneba-Takyi’s studio. Spread across eight rooms on the structure’s top floor, the studio is anchored by a chair—the object at the center of the 26-year-old’s practice. For Oheneba-Takyi, the humble chair is a totem of universal humanity: For everyone, everywhere, a chair is an invitation to sit. To rest, to gather at a dinner table, to talk. Sometimes, the subjects of Oheneba-Takyi’s paintings contort themselves around a chair, like a spent lover; at other times, they find themselves seated among a flock of empty chairs, as if taking shelter in their companionship. I’m interested in the community that exists between all of us,” says the artist, as he leads a tour through corridors lined with unfinished canvases, work he’s preparing for an upcoming exhibition. The chair is a point of reference, a commonality.”
Oheneba-Takyi’s chair fixation was sparked when he relocated to Accra to take part in the Noldor Artist Residency: The first thing he moved into his new apartment was a chair, which got him thinking, he says, about “the human presence” hovering, ghost-like, around it. Then, settling into the former pharmaceutical factory where Noldor is housed, he kept noticing chairs left behind by the plant’s previous tenants, and considered the ways they occupied the vast space, becoming an axis of orientation in the emptiness. “If human beings were there, what is suggested?” he wondered. “And if they weren’t—what then?”
Perhaps it’s Oheneba-Takyi’s background outside art that drew him to the chair’s expressive possibilities: A graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, he was conditioned by his study of construction to train his gaze on the man-made stuff of the world, and consider its use. That training fused with his interest in art, and he taught himself to paint both by researching the techniques of Renaissance masters and picking up tips from local street artists. The result is an idiosyncratic style that foreground’s the artist’s hand, each rough brushstroke a jubilant cry of “I am here! This is what I see!”
Nana Bruce’s work also speaks a universal language: Not chairs, in his case, but love. Gazing at one of his paintings is like catching sight of the fleeting moment when two people fall for each other—or recall what drew them together in the first place: Tenderness leaps off the canvas in works like “One More Refrain,” for example, with its couple entwined on the living room floor with a guitar and a glass of red wine. For Nana Bruce, it is Accra itself, and the kaleidoscopic variety of people inhabiting the city, that provide inspiration. “The lifestyle, the culture, the traditions coming from different tribes,” he says. “That’s how I pick my themes most of the time,” just casting an appreciative eye on the daily life around him.
What the artists of the Ghana School take from their community, they give back, both by honoring place and people in their work, and by coming together to create an art ecosystem that will endure beyond the current hubbub. Trends in the global art industry wax and wane, but the intent of initiatives like Botchway’s Worldfaze is the creation of a Ghanaian art infrastructure that will support generations of artists to come. “One of the main goals of my book was to showcase this community in Accra, the way one artist will lead you to another whose work they admire,” says Mensah. “This is what pushes us forward: It’s one thing to create on your own, but when you’re supported by a whole creative community, it feels real, it feels solid.” Today’s Ghana School wants to be the first of its kind, not the last. Joyous energy abounds—and, says Botchway, “We don’t want it to fade out.”
Originally commissioned by and published in BYREDO Magazine Bal d'Afrique issue in late 2023
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