Kwame Akoto

Biography

The workshop was called Anthony Art Works, and Kwame Akoto opened it in 1972, dedicating it to Saint Anthony of Padua. The name of the Franciscan friar, who according to the sources lived in the eleventh century, was his own choice. Later the sign changed.

Akoto was born in Kumasi in 1950 and finished elementary and middle school in the same city. He was drawn to drawing early. He studied with two local art masters, Addaï and Kobia Amafi; of other details of his training I have no information, and they would be hard to check. The workshop, opened when he was in his early twenties, worked to order for the city street. It turned out hand-painted posters for cinemas and signs for barbershops and beauty salons: the kind of thing that in Kumasi was painted by hand until such things came to be printed. His manner took shape here, directed at the client and at the passer-by, to whom a lettered sign and a picture had to say everything in a second. Then came a turning point in his life: Akoto became a Christian and took the name “Almighty God”. He renamed the workshop Almighty God Art Works. This religious experience shows in his work, where moral judgements addressed to the viewer often appear. I have not been able to find the exact dates of the conversion and the change of name.

The Ghanaian artist and art historian Atta Kwami wrote about him in the book Kumasi Realism, devoted to the artists of the city who worked in this tradition. Akoto is included in it as one of its subjects.

His work, and Akoto himself, have been featured in many exhibitions in Ghana, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Portugal and the United States. In 2022 the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, held a solo retrospective of his work. He lives and works in Kumasi.