Atta Kwami

Biography

In the spring of 2010 Atta Kwami spent three months as a fellow at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. For an artist from Kumasi this was one of many invitations abroad: he had already given a lecture at New York University, and residencies in Michigan and Maine still lay ahead.

He was born in 1956 in Accra, and at birth his name was George Atta Kwami. His father, Robert Kwami, taught music; his mother, Grace Kwami (née Anku), belonged to the first generation of contemporary Ghanaian artists. In 1976 he began studying painting at the College of Art of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, and he graduated in 1980. In 1986 he returned there as a teacher and later headed the department of painting and sculpture. In 1992 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in African art, and in 1993 he taught in London, at Chelsea College of Art and Design. In 2007 he defended a doctoral thesis in art history at the Open University. It dealt with contemporary Ghanaian artists, and in 2013 it was published as a book, “Kumasi Realism, 1951–2007: An African Modernism”. He was thus both an artist and the historian of the school he had come from himself.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1980 at the British Council in Accra. Then came Nottingham Castle Museum (1993), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (1994–1995), the National Museum of Ghana (1998–1999) and the Kunsthalle Basel (2001). He took part in the first and second Johannesburg Biennales, in 1995 and 1997.

He worked in a range of techniques: painting, printmaking, installations, large-scale sculpture and miniatures. His international reputation rested on abstract paintings, as well as on kiosk sculptures and gateways conceived as expanded three-dimensional painting. They play with the improvisation of colour and form characteristic of Ghanaian architecture and of textiles, above all kente, as well as the cloths of the Ewe and Asante peoples. His starting point was the urban environment of Kumasi, especially commercial districts such as Atonsu Agogo. To my mind it matters that he did not simply retell it in an abstract language: from market signs and shop shutters something new grew in his work. He did not regard a small format as a limitation: in his view, a small piece can carry as much energy as a large one. In 2008 he became the first Thoyer Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University. In 2010 he received the Philip Ravenhill Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, in January 2011 he was artist-in-residence at the University of Michigan, and in August 2011 he worked on a fellowship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. His work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the National Museums of Kenya.

From 1992 he was married to Pamela Clarkson, a painter and printmaker; they divided their time between Kumasi and Loughborough in the United Kingdom.

In 2021 Atta Kwami received the Maria Lassnig Prize, awarded by the Maria Lassnig Foundation in Vienna and the Serpentine Galleries in London. He died on 6 October 2021 in the United Kingdom. In 2022 his work was shown at the Serpentine and at the Lenbachhaus in Munich; he also created a triptych with large stained-glass windows for the new National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra.