Grace Kwami

Biography

Grace Salome Kwami's path into art ran through school teaching. She was born in 1923 in Worawora, a town in what is now the Volta Region, then part of the colony of the Gold Coast.

Her first education was at the Basel Mission's Women Teachers' Training College in Agogo. It was an institution for future women teachers, and a teacher she remained for her whole working life, although she arrived at it from a different direction than one might have expected. In 1951 Kwami enrolled at the Kumasi College of Arts, now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. There she studied art. Little is known about those years: which workshops she attended and under whom she studied is hard to establish from the information available. After the college, from 1954 to 1957, she worked as a sculptor at the National Museum of Ghana. The documents I have do not say which pieces she made in those three years. It is known that her fields were sculpture, painting and jewellery making, a wider range of activities than the usual lists of occupations suggest.

In 1957, the year Ghana became independent, she moved into teaching. She taught first at Mawuli School and then at Tamale Teachers' Training College, and she spent the period until 1978 in these two institutions. That adds up to more than twenty years of teaching; in my view this part of her biography forms the basis of her place in the history of Ghanaian art, although her influence on her pupils is hard to assess from the available data.

In 1954 she married Robert Kwami. Her son, Atta Kwami, also became an artist.

Grace Kwami's works have entered the collections of the National Museum of Ghana, the Volta Regional Museum and the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. Her work was recently included in the exhibition “African Modernism in America, 1947–67” at the Phillips Collection in Washington. She died in 2006.