Morphing Identity and Style in Contemporary Ghanaian Painting: Two Artists From Sekondi-Takoradi

Abstract

The term “morphing” is used in animation to describe the process of gradually transforming a sourced image, appearance, or form into another. This term amply reflects the state of contemporary painting in Ghana since her independence in 1957. The few published texts on modern and contemporary Ghanaian artistic developments have established at least three generations of contemporary Ghanaian artists and the periodization of their works. The notion of style has been used as the main method of classifying their artistic productions in response to these transformations. As a result, Maruska Svašek posits that, “In the history of Ghanaian artistic production … various individuals and groups have utilized the notion of style in order to present their arts as an expression of their ‘natural’ identity” (1997: 2). She suggests a seamless synergy between style and identity. The notion of identity and style in contemporary Ghanaian painting in this instance portends a merger between particular individual or shared innate attributes/ethos (as a result of relationships, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural factors, amongst others) and their corresponding artistic styles that culminate in the construction of what she describes as either individual or shared group identities.To define “contemporary Ghanaian painting” will mean clarifying the complexities of a now-historical but still evolving Ghanaian artistic phenomenon. Amelia Jones is of the view that the word “contemporary” refers to the present or that which is “in existence now” (2006: 1), such that contemporary Ghanaian painting denotes a current genre of Ghanaian artistic expression. However, we argue that this Ghanaian artistic genre has gone through several phases that are firmly rooted in Ghana's sociopolitical, economic, and cultural past, as well as the present (Fosu 2003).The first of three generations of modern and contemporary Ghanaian artists, according to Kojo Fosu (2013), is the “pioneers.” Svašek posits that the pioneers of contemporary Ghanaian art fought the “myth of static primitive traditions” and “claimed ‘European’ realism” (broadly defined and incorporating diverse styles, such as naturalism, impressionism, and figurative expressionism) as an artistic style to propagate their nationalist agendas of independence, decolonization, and the notion of the African personality (Svašek 1997: 5). The second generation, on the other hand, consists of artists who thematically freed their art from the dogmatism of the pioneers. Although this generation also adopted “European realism” or genre painting as their artistic style, they broke the myth of romanticizing their cultural past and started painting the life and scenes of the urban cities where they dwelled in the 1970s—specifically, Accra, the capital city of Ghana, and Kumasi, where Ghana's premier College of Art (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KNUST) is located. Painting, therefore, became a form of pictorial documentation about their present developments and experiences. Finally, the third generation constitutes a category of artists who “widely expanded the artistic horizon of their predecessors with home grown avant-garde expressions” (Fosu 2009: 8).This paper seeks to move beyond Fosu's generalized categorization of the third generation of contemporary Ghanaian painters by prioritizing and critically examining the unique contributions of Rikki Wemega-Kwawu and Brother Owusu-Ankomah toward the goal of defining the identity and style of Ghanaian artistic productions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both are Sekondi-Takoradi-based artists who fall within the larger paradigm of third-generation Ghanaian contemporary painters. We also present Sekondi-Takoradi, which has essentially been sidelined as a periphery in contemporary Ghanaian art history, as a significant urban center in the ecosystem of Ghanaian art. Although this study dwells on the commonalities in the artistic styles and philosophy of Wemega-Kwawu and Owusu-Ankomah, it does not in any way claim that the two artists developed their styles collaboratively. Wemega-Kwawu was emphatic in drawing the researchers’ attention to the fact that he developed his “style of work and philosophy years before any other person in their group did.”1Sekondi-Takoradi, also known as the Twin City, is the regional capital of the Western Region of Ghana. The city covers a total land area of 219 square km, with Sekondi as the administrative headquarters of the region. By 1894, Sekondi had already emerged as a “town”; however, it was not until 1962 that Takoradi also became recognized as a “town,” making Sekondi the older and larger of the two cities (Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly 2006; Busia 1950). Bordering the city are the three districts to its west, north, and east, with the Gulf of Guinea to its south (Fig. 1) (Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly 2019).With a projected population of 726,905 people in 2019, Sekondi-Takoradi is the industrial and commercial hub of the region (Ghana Statistical Service 2019). Although natives of the city are ethnically Ahantas, political and economic developments in the city have attracted people of diverse professional, economic, educational, religious, and ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, thereby defining the city's cosmopolitan ethnic demography. Some examples of firms and commercial institutions that attract both local and foreign immigrants to the city are the railway company, harbor, central market, hardware stores, supermarkets, hospitals, schools, banks, cinema houses, hotels, clubs, and processing and manufacturing industries, including cement, flour, timber, cocoa, and aluminum wares. However, because Sekondi-Takoradi is also a coastal city, fishing is the primary profession of the indigenes. Other crafts associated with fishing, like canoe painting and designing, also flourished.According to Franklin Obeng-Odoom (2012), Sekondi and Takoradi are indigenized forms of the original Prussian names of “Taccarary” and “Sacoundis.” This Prussian connection, according to Obeng-Odoom, can be deduced from the fact that Prussians were among the first foreigners to establish trade contacts with the people of Sekondi and Takoradi. Although commercial activity in the two towns is legendary, the city rose to prominence because of the role rail and sea transportation played in its economy. The operationalization of the first railway lines, the siting of the Gold Coast Civil Service headquarters in Sekondi in 1898, and the construction of the harbor in Takoradi in 1928 were the principal developments that significantly transformed the economic and cultural fortunes of the city (Busia 1950).The construction and operation of the railways, harbor, and other related economic structures and activities had a direct impact on the arts and culture of residents of Sekondi-Takoradi. This was evident particularly in the field of entertainment. A number of cinemas, social center spots, discotheques, and dance clubs—including the renowned Asamansido Dance Club; Harbor View, Atlantic Hotel; and the Venice, Rex, Princess (Fig. 2a), Prempeh, Liberty, and Zenith Cinemas—were established in this regard.2 The dance clubs and discotheques led to the flourishing of live-band music, which in turn led to the establishment of a long lineage of highlife bands and great music legends such as Bob Cole, Paapa Yankson, C.K. Mann, A.B. Crentsil, Ebo Taylor, Gydu-Blay Ambolley, Pat Thomas, Bob Pinado, Kiki Gyan (of Osibisa fame), Kofi Bentil, and Jewell Ackah. Cinema houses promoted the art of poster painting for announcing their shows. By the 1970s, there was a significant number of sign-writers or sign-painters in Sekondi-Takoradi who were producing captivating paintings of cinema posters and signboards for cinema houses3 (Fig. 2b).On the other hand, the influx of foreign tourists as a result of the operations of the Takoradi Harbour also led to the establishment of curio shops by craftsmen who produced souvenirs for the local tourism market in Takoradi. The works were later exported as well. These shops were mostly sited close to the harbor. One of the significant locations most artists frequented to sell their works to the foreign tourist was the Seaman Club, located at the entrance to the harbor. Seamen returning from months of duty tours on board cargo ships across the world also influenced the fashion trends and worldview of most of the youth of Sekondi-Takoradi. The thought of travelling abroad and obsession with information about life in the West became common among the youth and most indigenes of the Twin-City. The local seamen became the prime source of information about the West to their colleagues back home. In fact, the lofty tales they brought back from their travels were so captivating and infectious, they lured virtually every young person in the Twin-City to want to travel abroad to experience life in Europe and North America.Between 1960 and the early 1980s, operations of the poster painters and craftsmen had inspired a generation of vibrant practicing modernist Ghanaian artists in Sekondi-Takoradi.4 This loosely affiliated group of artists, which Elijah Sofo (2015) identifies as the “Sekondi-Takoradi Circle of Artists,” constitutes industrial and interior designers, self-taught artists, beginners or student artists, and academically trained artists, including Henry Ebenezer Ato Mensah (popularly known as Ato Cobra), Riverson, Joseph Smith Ansah (Josh), Brother Owusu Ankomah, Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, Henry Asare-Baah, Bright Bimpong, Samuel Ebo Bentum, Papa Kofi Kum-Essuon, Andrew Blankson Abaka, T.T. Blankson, George Afedzi-Hughes, Nana Nyan Acquah, Emmanuel Adiamah, and Andy Koney.Also, a number of Senior Secondary Schools, long established in Sekondi-Takoradi, were running Visual Arts as part of their academic program by the 1970s. Therefore, schools like St. Johns School, Sekondi College, Fijai Secondary School, and Ahantaman Senior Secondary School, to name a few, attracted distinguished art educators who were also practitioners to become part of the growing community of artists. Some of the practitioners/art educators included Fred Oko-Martey, E.O. Boateng, John Bentil, and Riverson.5Only a handful of artists of that generation are resident in Sekondi-Takoradi currently, many of them having migrated to the West or relocated to either Accra or Kumasi in the late 1990s. Many of them have gone on to achieve both national and international acclaim, with one of them, Bright Bimpong, attaining the enviable record of being one of the first African artists to be reviewed by the preeminent Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, educator, and art historian Okwui Enwezor (1996), of blessed memory, in a piece titled, “Bright Bimpong: Recent Sculptures.”6Brother Owusu-Ankomah is an internationally recognized contemporary Ghanaian painter, born in Sekondi in 1956 to Mr. Yaw Owusu-Ankomah and Mrs. Augustina Owuomoye Owusu-Ankomah, both successful business moguls from the Western Region of Ghana. Since childhood, Owusu-Ankomah has been interested in natural science. His studies resulted in numerous thumbnail drawings on paper and the walls of his home. His interest in nature also led to swimming at the beach, which he saw as a chance to get close to nature and as a source of spiritual renewal, and to an unflagging obsession with body-building from his youthful days. The latter interest is reflected in his incessant portrayal of well-built, muscular men in his art.Owusu-Ankomah had his elementary education in Sekondi before proceeding to Ghanatta College of Art in Accra in 1974 for his formal training in fine art. He returned to Sekondi in 1977 to fully embrace his vocation as a professional artist at age twenty-one. However, he relocated to Bremen in Germany in 1986, where he lived and practiced for almost three decades before returning home to Sekondi-Takoradi in 2015.Owusu-Ankomah's practice is deeply rooted in Sekondi-Takoradi. He was part of a community of artists in the city. Around 1979, he became friends with Joseph Smith Ansah, a collagist who later introduced him to Ato “Cobra” Mensah, who was widely seen as the doyen and inspirer of the circle of artists who practiced in Sekondi-Takoradi at the time. Even before his introduction to Ato Cobra, Owusu-Ankomah had developed a very close relationship with Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, dating back to their childhood days at the Old Hospital Experimental School in Sekondi, where Owusu-Ankomah was a year senior to Wemega-Kwawu. Owusu-Ankomah states that, “among all the members of our group, Wemega-Kwawu remains the closet to me. He is more than just a friend, he is like a brother to me.”7By 2006, Owusu-Ankomah gained international acclaim when his painting was selected for one of the art posters to commemorate the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany (Fig. 3). He has participated in a number of important solo and group exhibitions, including in Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Germany, Denmark, the United States, and the United Kingdom, to mention but a few countries. His paintings have also been widely collected by institutions, museums, and individuals in the United States and Europe, such as the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the British Museum, London. A seminal book on him titled Microcron Begins (Adepoju, Houghton, Kalkmann, Okediji, Owusu-Ankomah, and Wemega-Kwawu 2014) was published to accompany a travelling exhibition that opened at the October Gallery in London, which then travelled to Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg, Galeria Saro León in Las Palmas, Spain, and Skoto Gallery in New York.Owusu-Ankomah draws inspiration from the visual power of symbols, including the adinkra systems of his native Akan tradition, abstract symbols, industrial design symbols, as well as ancient ideograms from contemporary global cultures. Hence, the semiotics of his paintings go beyond geographical and cultural borders. He reinterprets symbols from their strict traditional contexts into a modern one where they are fragmented and used as motifs for his large-scale paintings. He is also inspired by the muscular figures in the Italian Renaissance paintings of Michelangelo as well as by concepts from traditional African and Eastern philosophy on spirituality.Owusu-Ankomah's artistic practice is informed by his belief that human beings are imbued with knowledge that is needed to develop their spiritual consciousness. With this consciousness they are able to identify and understand universal truths and gain what he calls “infinite intelligence” about their existence. According to Owusu-Ankomah, this can be achieved through spiritual renewal, meditation or getting close to nature and, most importantly, unconditional love.Therefore, Owusu-Ankomah has developed an artistic style that stimulates this idea of spiritual harmony in both the artist and the viewer. He further claims that his thoughts and emotions are transferred to the viewer through his paintings and, in turn, the viewer's subjective opinions and thoughts revert back to him as information through feedback (conversations), as well as, facial and bodily expressions. In a recent interview with the authors, Owusu-Ankomah stated,In essence, art to Owusu-Ankomah is not just a commodity or an aesthetic object to be appreciated. It is in service to the collective society and links to the infrastructure of various communities. He sees the artist as a teacher, prophet or visionary who directs people through the spiritual and practical path of consciousness. Further, he believes that the artist is a social critic who goes beyond the expression of ideas on canvas to make meaning of the sublime for society to learn from. Wemega-Kwawu observed that there is a strong sense of transcendence in Owusu-Ankomah's paintings and that his paintings “have a deep metaphorical existence. They elevate the viewer's consciousness of what life has to offer” (2014: 84).Ben Shahn, in “Shape of Content,” makes a profound statement that self-education does not mean uneducated and that, “It is historically true that an impressive number of self-educated individuals have also been brilliantly educated: widely read, travelled, cultured and thoroughly knowledgeable, not to mention productive” (1985: 115). Rikki Wemega-Kwawu perfectly fits this category of creative artists. He is an internationally known contemporary Ghanaian artist, art critic, and theorist who was born in 1959 in Sekondi, but currently lives and practices in Takoradi, Ghana. He is a native of Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana, as is the globally acclaimed master artist El Anatsui. He was born to Mr. Anthony K. Wemega-Kwawu, a mechanical draftsman and one of the stalwarts of the Ghana Railways, and Mrs. Philomena Wemega-Kwawu, a renowned school teacher for over three decades and a dressmaker/needlework specialist. Rikki, as he is popularly called, was a science student at St. John's School, Sekondi, and St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast, aspiring to become a material science engineer. However, he abandoned his studies in science after his Senior Secondary School education to pursue his calling as a professional artist in 1981. This was after he had been discovered by Ronnel Walton, an African American art dealer in Chicago. Largely self-taught as an artist, he won a residency at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, in 1998, after seventeen years of practicing as a professional artist. Rikki is a voracious reader and a prolific writer whose self-directed studies into the history of Western art and postcolonial African visual art practices earned him a year's appointment as an adjunct professor of postcolonial art history at New York University, Accra Campus, Ghana, in 2008.In terms of his personal development as an artist, Wemega-Kwawu claims that he developed his artistic style independent from anybody's influence, although he was part of an active circle of friends and artists in Sekondi-Takoradi around the late 1970s and early 1980s. The group included Ato Cobra, Bright Bimpong, Henri Asare-Baah, Dr. Agymang-Osei (also known as Dota), James E. Abakah, Brother Owusu-Ankomah, George Afedzi Hughes, Papa Kofi Kum-Essuon, and Nana Nyan Acquah, among others. Wemega-Kwawu acknowledged the contribution of this community of artists to his artistic development when, in 1989, he stated in the brochure for his first exhibition that, “The many endless hours of artistic exchanges, heated arguments, discussions and conversations, frequent inter-visits to studios have all been fruitful, for which I am most grateful.”As an eclectic artist, Wemega-Kwawu does not work in a single style. He alternates between realism and abstraction, even though he considers his abstract works as the most advanced of his oeuvre. He describes his works, which are bold experimentations using ethnic themes, as spiritual abstractions and Afro-metaphysical abstractions. With these works, he explores issues of flatness, tactile textures, optical mysteries, and transparencies, which according to him, were all attributes in traditional African artworks that impacted positively on Western modernism.Wemega-Kwawu's paintings have received positive reviews internationally and he has participated in many group exhibitions in Ghana and beyond, including The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art in 2008 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and Africa Now! Emerging Talents from a Continent on the Move, organized by the World Bank in 2008 at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC. His works can also be found in private and public collections such as the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, Germany, and the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC, to name a couple.In 2013, Wemega-Kwawu caught the art world's attention with a provocative critical essay titled “The Politics of Exclusion: The Undue Fixation of Western-based African Curators on Contemporary African Diaspora Artists,” which sought to criticize the curatorial regimes of Western-based African art curators, like Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and their cohorts. He argued that their curatorial agenda for the contemporary art of Africa, which tended to favor African artists living and working in the West, placing them far and above their counterparts domiciled on the continent, was inimical to the positive growth of contemporary art on the continent (Figs. 5–6).Wemega-Kwawu draws inspiration from a number of sources, including the visual language of graphic signs, pictographs, symbols, geometric shapes and forms, ancient African iconography, African spirituality and traditional Ghanaian textiles, like kente and adinkra cloth. He believes that these symbols are essential to the language and identity of Africans in a globalized world and that colonization has eroded the natural development of Africa's writing systems. He argues, therefore, that “If Africa had not been colonized, all our graphic forms and symbols would have evolved into our writing systems like that of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Islamic and Roman Calligraphy,” adding that “African is the only continent without a formal writing system.”9For Wemega-Kwawu, ancient symbols and iconography are a source of conceptual inspiration and capture the basic psychological and spiritual traditions of a people in the light of globalization, stemming from what Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, describes as the “collective unconscious.” As Wemega-Kwawu has observed, according to Jung, the collective unconscious is “an inherent inner realm belonging to the whole human race, past, present and future. They carry with them the entire individual and collective wisdom of man in history, prehistory and the history to come” (Wemega-Kwawu 2001: 76-77).Wemega-Kwawu is also inspired by Modernist artists including Piet Mondrian, Picasso, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro, as well as the New York school of abstract expressionists. He believes abstract expressionism was the highest apogee art ever achieved prior to its decline, starting from the 1960s.According to Rikki Wemega-Kwawu,Painting, to the artist, goes beyond the materiality and physicality of the canvas. It deals with the magico-mystical processes of transforming innate energies, thought processes, emotions, and experiences combined with functional, aesthetic compositions of elements and principles of art in an alchemical process to produce transcendental realities. He states that, “painting for me is a magical art; a ritualistic process, and the work I produce are sacred religious objects infused with magical, incantatory divine energy that has the transformative power to heal, empower and offer protection against evil.”11Wemega-Kwawu also believes that an artwork should communicate a global language beyond the locality of the artist. Thus, an artwork should adequately reflect the origins of the artist and also fit within the global context of modern and contemporary art. In consonance with that, he focuses on achieving a global aesthetic appeal in his work by combining forms and motifs from his classical African artistic roots with lessons from Western art history.The third generation of contemporary Ghanaian painters constitutes a group of experimental artists who emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Fosu, they are artists who “widely expanded the artistic horizon of their predecessors with home grown avant-garde expressions.” (2009: 8). They broke away from the regionalist mold and developed unique works that could be appreciated beyond the boundaries of Ghana. Fosu states that the third-generation of contemporary artists from Ghana tell their artistic stories in distinctive individual styles, loaded with personal expressions and experiences of mutual global interactions and exposure. Svašek posits that the third generation “emphasized that they were individuals who belonged to an international community of directly or indirectly communicating artists” (1997: 46), refusing to confine themselves and their artistic productions solely to the formalism and contextual hegemony of their senior colleagues (the second generation).This generation of artists emerged at a turbulent time in the political annals of Ghana. By the early 1980s, Ghana, like most of her West African neighbors, was in deep crisis. The country had already experienced two military insurrections (the 1979 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council revolt and the 1981 Provisional National Defense Council coup d'etat) and a number of failed counter-coup attempts. The year 1983 witnessed grim famine and wild bush-fire outbreaks that destroyed large acreages of farm lands, resulting in untold hardships, starvation, and nutritional deprivation in the nation. To compound this widespread hunger crisis, Nigeria deported shiploads of Ghanaians in their implementation of the Aliens Expulsion Order. There were also shortages of imported food supplies and other basic essential commodities, like sugar, milk, and soap. Obviously, art supplies were also in short supply or, in many instances, nonexistent. To crown it all, the military government at the time was forced to implement a stringent and controversial economic reform program dubbed the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), under the aegis of the Bretton Wood Institutions, to resuscitate Ghana's economy. These debilitating economic conditions were indeed harsh and affected many artists profoundly. Faced with this grim political, economic, and social quagmire, some artists left the shores of Ghana for the West, although a large number remained in the country. Although Wemega-Kwawu had earlier considered the idea of migrating, he eventually was among those who remained in Ghana. Owusu-Ankomah, on the other hand, migrated to Bremen in Germany under the duress of his parents, who wanted him to give up his career in art to pursue his family's legacy of successful entrepreneurship. He left the country, but he continued with his art practice.Ironically, the 1980s also witnessed the growth of modern and contemporary African cultural productions within the sphere of contemporary art in the United States and Europe. Two significant exhibitions held in major museums in New York and Paris spearheaded this engagement: “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Modern and Tribal and Magiciens de la terre. Wemega-Kwawu and a few of his friends in Sekondi-Takoradi keenly followed these developments, chiefly through journals and books (there was no internet then), alongside other intellectual debates on Modern art and Postmodernism among artists, critics, and historians in Europe and America. They saw this as proof that the boundaries that separated artistic production from the Western metropolitan centers and those from the colonial peripheries were beginning to disintegrate. Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, and Dieter opine that “hybridity” became the catchword and that some artists (here, referring to artists from the colonial peripheries) “attempted to work out a reflexive dialogue between global trends and local traditions” (2004: 617).It is, therefore, not surprising that in his manifesto published to accompany his first solo exhibition at the American Club, Accra, in 1989, titled A Ghanaian Painting Prophesy, Wemega-Kwawu proposed a new direction for contemporary Ghanaian artistic expression. This new direction synthesized the totality of traditional African art—its superficial attributes, spiritual, religious, and metaphysical contents and contexts—with the best lessons from twentieth-century Western modernism. His manifesto, A Ghanaian Painting Prophesy, appeared to be a clarion call to his colleague artists in Ghana to move beyond provincialism, that is, the “local,” and begin to partake in the global discourse on modern painting with their practice and thinking.Wemega-Kwawu (1989) argued that if Modernist artists from other continents saw good qualities in traditional African art and the art of other ancient cultures and infused those qualities into their works, then contemporary African artists had no reason not to appropriate from their own artistic heritage. He suggests that Western Modernists only scratched the surface of classical African art to advance their art. He called on contemporary Ghanaian and African artists to reorient themselves to the essentials of their artistic heritage as a foundation for their art “in the light of modern knowledge as we had an infinite resource of materials to fall on.” This, according to Wemega-Kwawu, is the only way that, as contemporary Ghanaian and African painters, “our art can come of age again, that we can hope to assert ourselves on the international art scene” (Wemega-Kwawu 1989: 17) (Fig. 7).In terms of ideology, Wemega-Kwawu's proposal was dialectically opposed to those expressed by most of the second generation contemporaries, especially Ato Delaquis. Ato Delaquis posits in his seminal essay, “Dilemma of the Contemporary African Artist” (1975), that the fundamental structures and conditions that informed the production of traditional African art had ceased to exist because of the overarching dominance of the vestiges of colonialism and Western imperialism on the continent. He was of the opinion that the continent, through contact with the West, had witnessed enormous political and sociocultural upheavals which broke away drastically from the African traditional past and ushered in a new Africa, an Africa he described as modern and basically very Westernized. This essentially was what he considered the modern status and identity of the African artist that reflected contemporary times. Hence, it was “awkward and backward” for contemporary Ghanaian and, for that matter, African artists living in urban cities with modern amenities and techno