1919–09.12.2012
Ataa Oko
Ataa Oko Addo (c. 1919 – 2012), a carpenter from the coastal town of La in Ghana, began making figurative coffins around 1945 and became one of the first masters of the craft. In his eighties, at the request of the Swiss ethnologist Regula Tschumi, he began drawing his old coffins and palanquins, and then rituals, dreams and spirits. He left about 2,500 drawings; some are held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
Biography
In a photograph from about 1960 Ataa Oko stands beside a coffin in the shape of a warship. He made such things in his native La, a coastal town in Greater Accra, for some sixty years: coffins in the form of a crocodile, a rooster, a hen, a ship.
He was born around 1919 and never spent a single day at school. From the age of thirteen he fished, and later his family sent him to the cocoa plantations of the Ashanti region.
In 1936 he was apprenticed to the carpenter Sowah Obu in Accra, and by 1939 he had learned the trade. Accounts of the following decades differ: according to one, he got by on temporary work until 1970; according to another, he set up his own business soon after his training. He opened his own coffin and palanquin workshop in La in 1951 or, by another account, around 1960. The model for his first figurative coffins was the figurative palanquins on which Ga chiefs were carried in Accra: they were made in the form of family symbols as early as the first half of the twentieth century. Ataa Oko’s first coffin, according to Regula Tschumi, was made around 1945 in the shape of a crocodile, which places him among the first masters of the craft, alongside Seth Kane Kwei. In 2009 he was photographed with the craftsman Kudjoe Affutu beside his coffin in the form of a red rooster; there is also a video of him making a hen coffin. He made coffins until 2006, and in his last years he had all but given up the trade.
He took up drawing by chance. Regula Tschumi was studying the figurative coffins of the Ga and met him in 2002. She asked him to draw the things he had made half a century earlier, and although he was already over eighty, he agreed. First came sheets with coffins and palanquins, then rituals, and then dreams and the spirits he said he had seen, and strange monsters. There is also a drawing of the 2010 football World Cup. Over ten years some 2,500 sheets accumulated. To my mind this is a rare case of an ethnographer’s request for information turning into an art in its own right.
His coffins and drawings were first shown in the exhibition “Six Feet Under” at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2006, and then at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. In 2010–2011 the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne gave him a solo exhibition, “Ataa Oko et les esprits”, and a twenty-minute film about him by Philippe Lespinasse, Regula Tschumi and Andress Alvarez came out at the same time. In 2011 his work was shown at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, then at the art museums of Hämeenlinna and Oulu in Finland and at the Ethnographic Museum in Neuchâtel.
Ataa Oko went on drawing until his death and died on 9 December 2012 in Greater Accra. Some of his most important works are in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. In 2020 his drawings were shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in an exhibition on mourning, and in 2022 the Museum der Völker in Schwaz devoted an exhibition to him, “The Spirits Play Football”.
Profile notes