Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

| african arts SPRING 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 1 Doran Ross was arguably the leading scholar of Akan art and visual culture, who, over the course of a very productive forty-five-year career, published eight books, over forty articles and book chapters, and countless shorter pieces dealing with the arts of the Akan and, on occasion, other parts of Ghana. References to his scholarship abound in the works of many scholars who have been writing about Akan art over the last half century, including the two of us. Rather than simply enumerate the contributions that Doran has made to Akan visual studies, we decided to present an edited transcription of a conversation we had in April 2021 that provided us the opportunity to reflect upon both our personal memories of Doran as well as the impact his writing and curatorial projects have had on the field of African art history. For those readers who might be interested, we have provided, at the end of this reflection, a list of Doran’s publications that deal with the arts of Ghana, particularly Akan societies.