Atta Kwami: September 14, 1956-October 6, 2021

Atta Kwami was a man of great kindness, courtesy, and clear-headedness, qualities manifested in his art, as in his person; and my epigraph sort-of encapsulates his significant place in thinking through an art history for Africa. Thus it is, in sorrow, that we commemorate his passing through this world, and through our lives: in sorrow at his departure—but also in joy as we remember his legacy. For Atta was a painter and printmaker who brought his vision of Ghana into an international art world1 (see Basciano 2021), and a designer and maker of things such as his artist's book about his mother, and his kiosks and archways that fall between various categories of art-making; and he was a university teacher, a well-published scholar (most especially Kumasi Realism [2013] based upon his PhD thesis), an active participant in Triangle workshops2 (including Shave, Somerset, England, 1994; Tenq, Senegal, 1995; Wasanii, Kenya, 1998; Cyfuniad, North Wales, 2001; and SaNsA, Ghana, 2004 [also 2007 and 2009], in which Atta was the principal organizer), a loyal member of ACASA, a voracious collector of books, and a devoted husband to the painter Pamela Clarkson Kwami.I first met Atta Kwami in Kumasi, in 1994. I had a spell of sabbatical leave from teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and I had heard interesting things about painting in Kumasi, especially regarding a supposed contrast between university artists and the inner-city signboard painters. In London I had previously met Atta's colleague and former teacher, the painter Ato Delaquis; and Sarah Brown, then one of my students, had written her BA dissertation about these two groups of artists. So I wanted to see for myself.3 Atta introduced me to Kwame Akoto, master of the Almighty God Artworks, one of the city's many sign-painting studios, and I soon met others. Atta and I travelled together through south-eastern Ghana looking at and talking about works of art of all shapes, sizes and materials: painted and sculptured grave monuments, earthen protective figures, pottery, textiles, sculptures intended to provide vehicles for magical medicines, especially in the Ewe-speaking region. We stayed with his mother, Grace Kwami, also an artist and teacher, and, as one of Ghana's pioneer artists, a major influence in Atta's life as a person and as an artist (Court 2022).Atta was interested in everything, every mode of art-making, even the manner in which women in the market took the trouble to display their oranges in ways that would attract attention and, via that aesthetic, attract sales. I'd like to think this was my attitude as well, interested in all forms of making, especially at a time when the study of art in Africa had had to be pulled through a crisis wrought in part by the pernicious effects of the notorious. neo-primitivist, 1989 Magiciens de la terre Paris exhibition.4 This was an intolerable situation, fortunately blown apart by artists and curators through the years following Magiciens. Painting in Kumasi and Atta's research, and his book Kumasi Realism, proved to be essential parts of this decolonizing process, thereby restoring sanity to African art studies that embraced all aspects of visual culture, whether current, contemporary, the inheritance of a recent past, works of a greater antiquity, the revelations of archaeology, and so forth.As I look through the notes given to me by Pamela5 for the preparation of this obituary notice, and without which it could not have been written, I am struck not just by Atta's devotion to his work, but to his energy in generating a continuous process of making, and writing, and publishing, and exhibiting, in Ghana, and through the wider art worlds of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. From his nineteenth year until even after his demise in 2021, Atta participated in more than 130 exhibitions, whether solo or group—some curated by him, thereby also creating opportunities for others as well as for himself. The list begins in Ghana, in Ho, then spreading to Tamale, Krokobite, Kumasi, and Accra; then sometimes several locations in each of Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, South Africa, and on to the UAE, South Korea, Romania, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, UK, United States, and Mexico. Moreover, Atta's work is to be found in public and private collections in Austria, Canada, Cote d'Ivoire, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Switzerland, UK, and the United States. I doubt that these lists are yet complete, even though, at present, we know they must end with the mural currently still on display at the Serpentine North gallery, London, its ultimate destination yet to be decided (Fig. 1). This was Atta's response to the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize in 2021, his final award,6 following upon a distinguished list of international awards, grants, and prizes that had encouraged Atta to take early retirement from his teaching in Kumasi.Atta was born in Accra. His father was a pianist, senior music master, and Latin teacher at Achimota, but died of polio six months later. His mother, Grace Salome Kwami (1923-2006), was one of the pioneer artists trained in Kumasi (in what would become the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology). As a result of his father's death, the family (including his twin sister and their elder brother) moved to Ho, in the Volta region, where Grace had been offered a job as a schoolteacher. In 1970 Grace was offered a teaching post in Tamale; by this time Atta was already a student at Achimota school, but spent his holidays in Tamale, where, with Grace's encouragement, he set up his own studio so that he could continue his studies of line and form. For his A-levels he moved to Mawuli School, Ho, where Kate Ofori, a painter, was his art teacher. From 1976 to 1980 Atta was a student at the Art College in Kumasi, subsequently returning to Tamale for his National Service as a training college art teacher. When that was done he was appointed to an art teaching post in Uyo, south-eastern Nigeria, and in 1986 he was appointed to teach painting in what was then the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. In 1991 Pamela Clarkson came to the university as artist-in-residence (supported by the British Council) and taught print- and paper-making. Toward the end of 1991, Atta was briefly artist-in-residence at the College of Art in Loughborough, where Pamela lived, giving lectures on Ghanaian painting there and at the Royal College of Art in London. In January 1992 Atta and Pamela married, in London. Also in 1992 Atta was awarded the MPhil by his university in Kumasi for a dissertation on Ghanaian painting. A Commonwealth scholarship for the 1992-93 academic year, awarded via the Ghanaian government, enabled Atta to take up a fellowship at Chelsea College of Art for the autumn term, then move to the RCA for the spring and summer terms for a Post Experience Programme in which he studied printmaking, the outcome of which included an artist's book entitled Grace Kwami, Sculpture, honouring his mother, its form drawing upon the idea of the spider as storyteller in Ghanaian popular culture (Fig. 2). Atta returned to Kumasi to continue teaching until 2006, when he took early retirement in order to devote himself full-time to art making, and also completed the research that led to his PhD, awarded by the Open University in 2007. I had the privilege of being Atta's external supervisor,7 soon discovering that his research and his ideas flowed into words with such ease that there really was nothing for me to do other than listen, read, discuss, and learn. It was published in 2013 as Kumasi Realism 1951-2007: An African Modernism.Atta often spoke about carrying a visual memory with him, a memory that entailed his mother, his time in Tamale in northern Ghana, and his experience of the very different visual environments of southern Ghana. In regard to a painting I particularly admired, entitled Fiase (shop fronts) (see Picton 2023: 68, Fig. 13), he told me how his work was sometimes like seeing the bright Ghanaian urban environment as if through the crack between a door and its doorpost. He engaged with that world, brightening up the places in which his work was exhibited, introducing the uniqueness of Ghana to the wider world, especially that of an often dismal Europe. As to that visual memory, the following quotations from Atta's writing are particularly relevant:Then, in the final chapter of his Kumasi Realism, we read:However, Atta did not regard the development of his own work as part of Kumasi realism. This he defined asIndeed, Atta's preference for the schematic in the context of his visual resources placed him somewhat at odds with the prevailing attitudes of his department in Kumasi. Pamela tells us how,Perhaps it is little wonder that in 2006 he took early retirement from his Kumasi post in order to devote himself fulltime to his art-making, given the context of his growing reputation, supported by sales, commissions, and awards, culminating, as already noted, in the Maria Lassnig award.Atta was at home in Ghana and its multiple art worlds, and he was equally at home in the international art worlds of Europe (in which I include the UK), the United States, and elsewhere, and speaking at international conferences. His work was at the same time intensely local and deeply international in a world that cannot afford to be without people like Atta; at least we can cherish and learn from his legacy of peace, understanding, creativity, vision, scholarship, hospitality and his devotion to Pamela.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.