Kumasi Junction

Capital of Ghana’s Asante region, Kusami abounds with art workshops whose hand-painted signs, posters and advertisements adctivate the city’s streets, shops, hairdressing salons and ‘temporary’ kiosks. It is also home to the oldest art college in sub-Saharan Africa, where painter Atta Kwami teaches. While both traditions are part if the modern city of Kumasi, it is the work of street painters that has tended to be accorded greater critical legitimacy, with the work of college-based painters being given a lesser status due to its association with the imported model of the ‘academy’.

Described as a ‘second generation African modernist’, Kwami questions the rigid distinctions made between ‘street’ and ‘academy’, arguing that each has influenced the other. Kusami Junction looks at this reciprocal inflemce through the works of Kwami himself, and those of street art workshops such as Almighty God Art Works, Supreme Art Works and others. A street painter’s studio in the gallery will evoke the academies of the street, where the location, production and display of art work is integrated, where aesthetic, social and communication functions mesh, and where training is far more rigidly structured than on the campus.

The exhibition features work by artists such as Kwame Akoto (Almighty God Artworks), Alex Amofa (Supreme Art Works), Issac Otchere Azey (Azey and Alberto) and Barbington Boakye (Excellent Art Works).