20.03.1965–present
Betty Acquah
Betty Acquah (born 1965) paints the women of Ghana, whom she calls the “unsung heroes of the republic”: in oil and acrylic, often with the dotted stroke of pointillism. She studied at the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi and at the Tokyo School of Art, worked in 1989–1993 at the gallery of the Centre for National Culture in Accra, and has exhibited in Nigeria, Britain, India, Germany, Spain, Japan and the United States.
Biography
In June 2019, on the BBC programme “Newsday”, Betty Acquah said she hoped to live to see a national art gallery open in Ghana. It is perhaps her best-known public statement, and it is about the audience, not about herself.
She was born on 20 March 1965 in Cape Coast, an old port town on the coast of Ghana, and went to school there at Wesley Girls’ High School and Holy Child School. Then came the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi: she took her bachelor’s degree in art with first-class honours and stayed at the same university for a master’s in painting. She took a further professional course in Japan, at the Tokyo School of Art. From 1989 to 1993 she worked at the art gallery of the Centre for National Culture in Accra, and in 2002–2005 she curated exhibitions at the Berj Art Gallery. She is a member of the Ghana Association of Visual Artists, and at home she is regarded as one of the most prominent women painters of her generation.
She paints in oil and acrylic on canvas, often with a dotted stroke like the pointillists, in dense, saturated colours, and almost always about women: their labours, hopes, celebrations and triumphs, the stories she weaves into the canvas one after another. The women of Ghana she calls the “unsung heroes of the republic”, and she regards her painting as feminist. Her first solo exhibition was shown at the Pan African Festival of Arts and Music on the Trade Fair grounds in Accra; since then her work has been exhibited in Ghana, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, India, Germany, Spain, Japan and the United States, and by some accounts in Dubai as well.
Little is known about her: two short encyclopaedia entries and one radio interview. They give neither titles of paintings nor dates of exhibitions, and I will not invent them; even the length of her time at the Centre for National Culture is given differently, four years or seven. It seems to me a rare case of a painter with a thirty-year career and exhibitions on three continents who has almost no written history; here, for now, the biography ends.
Profile notes