Ablade Glover

Biography

It was a teacher in Newcastle, where Glover studied art education in 1964–65, who suggested a palette knife instead of a brush. He has laid on paint with the knife ever since, in thick layers, so that the canvas takes on relief, and warm, clashing colours do the rest.

Emmanuel Ablade Glover was born in 1934 in La, one of the districts of Accra, then still in the British colony of the Gold Coast. He went to Presbyterian mission schools, and in 1957–58, as Ghana gained independence, trained as a teacher at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. The new government urged artists and craftsmen to hold on to their own culture while studying Western art, and Glover won a scholarship to the Central School of Art and Design in London, where from 1959 to 1962 he studied textile design. On his return he taught briefly in a school, then left again on a scholarship: a year at Newcastle upon Tyne, then the United States, a master’s degree at Kent State University and a doctorate at Ohio State University in 1974.

After the doctorate he returned to Kumasi for twenty years, to the College of Art of the same university: he headed the Department of Art Education, became Dean of the College and an associate professor. In 1994 he left teaching for painting and a gallery of his own.

The Artists Alliance Gallery in Accra grew out of one he had opened back in the 1960s (little is known about that first gallery); in its new building it was opened by Kofi Annan in 2008. Besides Glover’s own work it shows Owusu-Ankomah, George Afedzi Hughes and other Ghanaian artists, and beside the paintings stand old local objects for collectors.

His subjects are almost always urban and crowded: markets, squares, lorry parks, shanty towns on the outskirts, moments of prayer, beaches and forests, and a great many women. Why women, he has been asked more than once. The first time, he recalled, he answered without thinking: because they are more beautiful than men. Later, thinking it over, he found the real reason: the women of Africa have courage, and they show it when they walk down the street. Glover’s manner has been described as “swirling between abstraction and realism”: from a distance his crowd reads as a market or a road, close up it breaks into strokes and patches. In 1992 he was invited to New York for the exhibition “Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition”, the first major American show given over entirely to African artists; among the ten participants were El Anatsui and Bruce Onobrakpeya. London’s October Gallery has shown him since 1982 and by 2024 had mounted ten solo exhibitions, including one for his seventy-fifth birthday in 2009, one for his eightieth in 2014 and “Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys” for his ninetieth in July 2024; in Barcelona the Tasneem Gallery has exhibited him three times.

The awards came mostly after sixty: the Flagstar Award from the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana and the distinguished alumni award of the African-American Institute in New York in 1998, the Order of the Volta in 2007, the Millennium Excellence Award in 2010. He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Glover’s works are held in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and at O’Hare airport in Chicago.