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Stepping Stones, 2007 A child who has never travelled thinks his mother’s soup is the best. (Ewé, west Africa proverb: Devi matsa du kpo bua be ye dada fe detsi vivina wu ame bubuwo to.)
ATTA KWAMI
T
his memoir relates and connects my several homes and my many sojourns abroad, for now the list is long of workshops, courses, trips, residencies and curating exhibitions. Perhaps, the deepest cut was Shave Farm International Artists’ Workshop, 1994; it was my first engagement with a multicultural cast of practitioners, a watershed event pointing to myriad options. Before commenting on the times away, I should begin ‘at home’ with the home that provided a firm (and I realise unique) foundation, equipping me to step out, to seek new artistic experiences and to utilise them.
Many Homes (West Africa) I was born in September 1956 in Accra, Ghana. Six months later my father died of polio. He was Robert Ashong Kwami (1913-57), a renowned pianist and senior music master at Achimota School in Accra. Grace Salome Kwami née Anku (1923-2006), my mother, was a practicing artist all her life. She was among the pioneer Art Specialists trained at the School of Arts & Crafts, Kumasi College of Technology (now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology: KNUST, also known as ‘Tech’) where I also studied and taught for over twenty years until 2006. After my father’s death, my mother returned to the Volta Region to teach art at Mawuli School in Ho and in 1970 transferred to Tamale in the Northern Region. After a few years in Ho, I attended Achimota School in Accra, spending the long vacations at Tamale. Northern Ghana is climatically and culturally very different from the south and I have always found its environment stimulating in terms of patterns (organic and built) and materials, for instance, I used a porcupine quill for drawing. Finally, I completed my ‘A Levels’ at Mawuli where the painter Kate Ofori was my art teacher. Her lessons in life drawing, still life and textiles were taught with dynamism and commitment; she Stepping Stones, 2007 • ATTA KWAMI | 225
Figure 1 Grace Kwami Sculpture, 1993. Artist’s book in mixed media. 7.5 x 27 x 37.5 cm. Fabricated during a Post Experience Programme at the Royal College of Art, London. Collection of the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC. Purchase funds donated by Brian and Diane Leyden. Photo: Frank Khoury, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
even hijacked an airconditioned photo studio for our practical work. Yet, if I had to go further back to recall the wonder, the profound inf luence, of seeing the techniques and processes of art-makers, it would have to be my mother, Grace Salome Kwami. The day before my twin sister and I enrolled at the local Evangelical Presbyterian Primary School, Ho-Kpodzi (both our grandfathers were ministers of the E P Church), I watched my mother construct boxes in which to carry our rulers, books, pencils, slate and chalk. She made them from brown straw-board and, on top of each box, she glued a colour print of a tree in a landscape with a blue sky. The visceral impact of those boxes and how they were made is embedded in my memory. My twin sister Georgina Attawa died when we were thirteen. The sadness of this experience has never left me. Although I would later learn from other art teachers, I feel most grateful for my mother’s informal lessons which engendered in us a love for learning. At home, a general atmosphere of freedom prevailed in which to grow and f lourish, boosting our creativity. For instance, she made cards to aid us in learning the alphabet; she arranged painting sessions, I remember clearly the tray with tubs of bright colours. Also of importance is my mother’s professional behaviour; she shunned publicity and the male-dominated 226 | ARTISTS AND ART EDUCATION IN AFRICA
establishment; this was a model from which I learned the value of independence and the need to guard a creative future. In honour to her, following a lengthy gestation during 1980’s and early ‘90’s, I produced Grace Kwami Sculpture. It is an artist’s book in the form of a spider with fold-out paper limbs that are printed with varied images from her work and life. Like a portable, mini-exhibition, it travels in its own special, fabric-covered box (Figure 1). I have always wanted to be an artist. An early memory, prior to elementary school, is when I took some chalk and a small blackboard and started drawing human faces. When my older cousin Seth Anku saw what I was doing, he joined me and he drew the most beautiful human head I had ever seen. I remember my astonishment to this day. Later, at the College of Art in Kumasi, I would encounter different personalities and attitudes to painting. My secondary art teacher from Achimota, Ato Delaquis was now there as lecturer in figurative painting and graphic art. Other artists who impressed me were Professor Edmund Kwame Jimmy Tetteh and a fellow student Ben Paapa Nketsiah. Tetteh kept a meticulous record of all the work that left his studio! Also—with a contemporary feel—he wrote articles and experimented with mixed media. With Nketsiah, I appreciated the exuberance and originality he brought to finding his way in art. Delaquis’s stance was interesting, not that I wanted to be like him; though a conventional lecturer, he was master of the bravado gesture. Dressed in a denim jacket, a bold smear of red cadmium paint on the sleeve, he stalked the studio like a hero. He validated the role of painter-illustrator in Ghanaian art, just as pioneer, national artists Kofi Antubam and Ernest Victor Asihene had done before him; their overt social awareness contrasts with my own more covert approach. After college (1976-80) and national service teaching in Tamale, I took a post in south-eastern Nigeria where my older brother Robert, a music specialist, was already teaching at the College of Education. My task was to set up an art department at the then Cross River State School of Arts and Science, Uyo. As a pastime we both played highlife and jazz in a band. I used my earnings to develop my studio, travel and to exhibit throughout Nigeria. After quitting Nigeria I joined Robert in Southampton for a month, visiting museums and galleries in London. On my return to Ghana in 1985 I freelanced for a year in Accra and Ho, making paintings, batik pictures and shirts, and mounting exhibitions with the Workshop 358 Group alongside Kofi Setordji, Kofi Dawson, Kofi Aryee and other artists, before my appointment as a lecturer at Tech. My work has changed a lot since then. The Ghanaian art critic Kojo Fosu has described my practice as “intensely individualistic” (1984, Mother & Son exhibition, Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University), but I believe it is part of continuing Ghanaian traditions of hand work that I have studied over the years. My work is personal but it has meaning for other people as well, as shown by these examples. In 1989, J M Y Oppong, then a chief, commissioned fifteen painted murals for his Kumasi home. My source of inspiration was the drawings on the wall outside the main market in Tamale, which were executed in charcoal on a plain cream-coloured surface. My murals also complemented the sculpture already installed at the Oppong home; these had been made by my cousin Seth Anku, by then a lecturer in sculpture at Tech and for whom I worked as an assistant in 1974. Following the commission, I was able to publish Stepping Stones, 2007 • ATTA KWAMI | 227
Figure 2 Mural, 1989, J M Y Oppong residence, Kumasi, Ghana, synthetic enamel and acrylic on concrete, dimensions unknown. Photo: Atta Kwami
A Dagbon Sketchbook: A Book of Drawings (1989) which presents a selection of my work associated with my stay in northern Ghana, 1972-89. While the imagery in my completed works then and now is schematic or non-figurative, I often sketch from observation and find it is stimulating to work with different modes of representation (Figure 2). In 1991, I met the British artist Pamela Clarkson when she came to the KNUST for six months to set up a print studio. In 1992, we married and since 1993 we have lived mostly in Kumasi where we share studios and an array of art projects. In my work as a teacher, I have been concerned that my students make good work, regardless of their idiom or genre. By ‘good work,’ I mean the energy is rightly placed in terms of wholeness and process. I favour the kind of work in which the interaction between innovation and tradition is a subtle matter (Kwami 2007). Through so many experiences, my practice has evolved in a way likened to “Sonic Grids” (Deliss 2001) Over time, I have been better able to embody those aspects of my everyday life which have greatest significance: kiosks, commercial (sign) painting, woven textiles, Ghanian music (Koo Nimo) and jazz, all of which allow for serial composition in strips, stripes, grids. I have focused on colour as subject matter, perhaps taking me back to where I started as a child with the perception of my mother’s paints and textiles, but my art also resonates, I have seen, with the wider-world of colour formalist painters, such as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rotho, Sean Scully (Figure 3). 228 | ARTISTS AND ART EDUCATION IN AFRICA
Many Abroads This second section shares selected key ‘stones’ of my experiences abroad and a return project for art in Ghana. As noted above, Shave Workshop 1994 opened my eyes to “myriad options.” These options were an alternative kind of education in art, in which artists learned from each other and were encouraged to take risks, to be experimental. I used the opportunity to make a cardboard installation, Cargo Cult, in a shed, much like a kiosk. The process at Shave involved daily discussions between artists and with critics and also exposure to networks previously unknown to me. Following closely on Shave, in advent to the UK’s africa95 season, I participated in Tenq Workshop held at the lycée in the old city of St Louis, Senegal, near Mauritania. Tenq means articulation in Wolof; the St Louis school is a site of great significance because it is where formal education was first introduced to francophone Africa (1840). The event brought together twenty-six career artists from ten countries of Africa and the UK, many of whom I knew by reputation but never before had met. These included the well-seasoned, expressive colourists David Koloane of South Africa and Keita Souleymane of Senegal and the sculptor Moustapha Dimé, also from Senegal, who pioneered the transformation of found materials into objects of modern art. Most work by Tenq artists demonstrated that artists in Africa share an attitude that enables them to explore contemporary materials beyond preconceived notions of what constitutes African art. This exposure made it possible for me to see where I stood in relation to my contemporaries and to witness the articulation of “new dimensions in cultural history of Africa” (Kwami quoted in BBC Focus, 1994). These two artists’ workshops mark the start of many such international opportunities to participate in parallel academies as an artist, curator and scholar. Then, I made a different sort of leap, that of introducing the Triangle model of artists’ workshop to Ghana (Figure 4). Since the late 1960s there had been some recognition of a Kumasi school of painting composed of city-street workshops and college-based art-making but the situation lacked dynamism. Our arts scene seemed to need a break from academic dogma and to engage more widely with different kinds of contemporary practice. We — several local artists, Triangle Arts Trust and myself — organised SaNsA to provide the means to generate such encounters. The name SaNsA combines Asante and Ewe words to denote diversity and unity, which were the themes of our Workshop. Our mixture of participants ref lected plural approaches to art, encompassing street painting, international and indigenous art practices. While most artists were from Ghana, others came from Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, the UK and the USA. The workshop was held at Tech in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. For two weeks (30 January – 10 February 2004), we went into each others’ studios, watched each others’ work develop, gave talks about our practices, discussed art critically and widely, ate, drank and also took visits to other art places in Kumasi. The high levels of spontaneity, scope of work and collaborative efforts were hugely stimulating. Many artists made innovative use of local materials. Especially memorable was the sculpture by Samuel Olou which was built from rope, wood and metal braziers to evoke the melancholy of migration. SaNsA group exhibitions were held at Alliance Française centres in Kumasi and Accra. The second edition of SaNsa took place in November 2007 at Krokobitey Stepping Stones, 2007 • ATTA KWAMI | 229
Figure 3 Ash Town, 2006, acrylic on linen canvas. 40 x 40cm. Ash Town refers to a suburb of Kumasi. Photo: Atta Kwami. Collection of Virginia Ryan
Institute, near Accra (Figure 5) and the third edition in 2009 at the National Culture Centre in Kumasi, the latter in collaboration with the British Museum Africa Programme (Figure 7). I also made a smaller archway as part of my doctoral degree (Figure 6).
Soup and Stones Things are coming together, now. Over the last seven years, at home and abroad, I have been pursuing the topic of ‘Kumasi Painting’ through primary research, my own painting and curating exhibitions. These projects take me to Europe periodically, to such places as Austria, Switzerland, and the UK where at the Open University I recently completed my doctoral research in art history. Working in different places requires an ongoing preparedness to take the work wherever I go. This state of mind combines heightened awareness and a state of forgetfulness – letting go, a condition that I enjoy. But, I cannot readily or regularly achieve this condition due to the demands of day-to-day living. 230 | ARTISTS AND ART EDUCATION IN AFRICA
Figure 4 African Archway 1999, wood and paint, 320.2 x 244 x 485 cm. First displayed in the public Jeevanjee Gardens, central Nairobi; here installed in the public sculpture garden of the Nairobi National Museum, Kenya, 2000. The work, which was Kwami’s first large archway, no longer exists due to termite damage. Photo: Elsbeth Court
Figure 5 Ghana Archway 2007, wood and paint, 305 x 549 x 122 cm. Fabricated during SaNsA II International Artists Workshop, Kokrobitey, Ghana; here displayed in a private garden, Accra, Ghana, 2009. Kwami dedicated his 2007 archways to the 200th anniversary commemoration of the 1807 UK Parliamentary Act to abolish the British slave trade Stepping Stones, 2007 • ATTA KWAMI | 231
Figure 6 Milton Keynes Archway maquette 2007, wood and paint, dimensions unknown. Photo: Atta Kwami. This archway featured in Kwami’s doctoral exhibition, Amadele, at the Open University and was the model for Kumasi Archway 2009 (Figure 7) and Amsterdam Archway 2011 (not illustrated).
My final thought is that there is no right way to be an artist; each person makes their own search and re-search. Coincidental with my introduction, a concluding proverb is ‘The poor do not eat stones’ (Ewé: Hia to medua kpe o). The name of a design for Ewe kente cloth, it implies the concept that the poor may sometimes place stones in their cooking pot as the bases for preparing soup; stones of hope. This inspires me to find new goals in my development — new ‘stepping stones’ in my career. I can trace their directions, patterns and dimensions as they unfold, creating something new.
POSTSCRIPT Archways Notes (Atta Kwami, 2013) The serial works of outdoor archways were made between 1999-2011 in different locations. In all of these travels, I sought to carry my world with me; this implies the memory that I carry with me. In that sense my painting can be a recollection or interpretation of the visual environment of Ghana, especially Kumasi. I have focused on colour as subject matter, perhaps taking me back to what I started with as a child, in my mother’s studio; the perception of colour-tablets in tins. … The first walk-through archway was courtesy of my residency with the Kuona Arts Trust which had specified a participating artist would produce a public art project in 232 | ARTISTS AND ART EDUCATION IN AFRICA
Figure 7 Kumasi Archway 2009, wood and paint, 305 x 549 x 122cm. Fabricated during SaNsA III International Artists Workshop, National Cultural Centre, Kumasi, Ghana. Photo: Daniel Kerkhof
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Figure 8 Dzedodo 2011, acrylic on linen canvas, 122 x 122cm. In the Ewe language (Volta region of West Africa), dzedodo denotes conversation, such as “when there is an issue or call for discussion ... When I paint, I am sometimes in a trance; other times it feels like a conversation between myself and the materials; or with other artists, alive and dead, African and non-African.” (Author e-mail to EC, 30 March 2012). Photo: The Newark Museum. © Newark Museum
Nairobi — that residency followed Kuona’s 2nd International Artists’ Workshop at Lake Navaisha. I devised African Archways: a large wood superstructure with two passageways which I covered with 290 of my polychrome painted panels. Small images when assembled together can create a surprising visual impact. I experienced this transformation when I put them together, a kind of metamorphosis of processes of arrangement and manipulations of colour, light, space and mass that turns a painted sculpture into a relational artwork. The whole created an unexpected object for contemplation in a Nairobi public park. This work, exploring the notion of unity, was dedicated to the idea of the African Union (Figure 4). 234 | ARTISTS AND ART EDUCATION IN AFRICA
My paintings and installations imply grounding in textiles and textile designs as source or marker of identity. ... By extension, the design system offered by Ghanaian kente where arrangements of narrow-strip textile are stitched into a bigger whole is a similar process. Even the frequent improvisations of an artist can become predictable, but for me the final result of a painting is not known, beforehand.
Notes 1
My gratitude to EC for recommending me to the co-ordinators of the Shave Workshop: Rowena Pearce and Quentin Seddon; also thanks to my benefactors over the years, especially to Lisa Joffe for sponsorship to Shave.
2
The spider references the Ghanaian folkloric character Kweku Ananse who is our custodian of wisdom and ingenuity. Through its form and content, my artist’s book integrates many cultural traditions; it pays homage to other artists, reflects on African ceramics and the fables of Ananse, whose presence resonates in the Caribbean and African-American traditions in the New World. See Elizabeth Harney, 2007: p218, p222 (illustration).
References Bambolse. Art journal published annually, 1991-95. Kumasi: Bambolse Press. Harney, Elizabeth 2007: ‘Word Play: Text and Image in Contemporary African Arts,’ in Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney & Allyson Purpura, eds. Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Images. Journal of the College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. Intermittent 1970-71, 1977-79, 2003 (seven issues). Kunstalle Basel 2001: Atta Kwami. Exhibition catalogue with essays by Clementine Deliss, Atta Kwami, Christina Végh. Kwami, George Dzigbordi Atta 2007: ‘Kumasi Painting 1951-2007.’ PhD thesis. Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Kwami, Atta 2003: ‘Ghanaian Art in a Time of Change,’ in Falgayrettes, C and Christiane OwusuSarpong, eds. GHANA hier et aujourd’hui: Yesterday and Today. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Editions Dapper. Kwami, Atta 2002: Kumasi Junction. Exhibition catalogue. Llandudno, Wales: Oriel Mostyn Gallery. Kwami, Atta 1995: ‘Textile Design in Ghana: Extracts from a Report,’ in Picton, J, ed. The Art of African Textiles; Technology, Tradition and Lurex. Exhibition catalogue. London: Barbican Art Gallery/Lund Humphries Publishers. Kwami, Atta 1989: A Dagbon Sketchbook: A Book of Drawings. Ho, Ghana: Edition RAG. Okeke-Agulu, Chika 2013: ‘Globalization, Art History, and the Specter of Difference,’ in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds. Contemporary Art 1989 to the Present. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Woets, Rhoda 2011: ‘What is this?’ Framing Ghanaian art from the colonial encounter to the present. Amsterdam: Vrije University.
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