By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

For Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist Ebenezer Nketsiah Mensah, art is inseparable from lived experience.

His journey from the gold-mining communities of Tarkwa and the construction sites in Ghana to the studios and classrooms of an American college has given his work an unusual intimacy with questions of labor, migration, identity, power, and material culture.

Today, Mensah is a contemporary artist and an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Talladega College in Alabama. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and photographic documentary, he draws on experiences in Ghana and the United States to investigate the forces that shape individuals and communities in an increasingly interconnected world.

His artistic trajectory began in Ghana, where he earned a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi) in 2018. He later moved to the United States, where he completed an MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Florida in 2025. Along the way, his practice has garnered recognition through exhibitions, awards, fellowships, and competitive artist residencies.

At the heart of Mensah’s work is labor. His firsthand experience as a gold miner and construction worker in Tarkwa has profoundly shaped his artistic concerns. Rather than examining labor from a distance, he approaches it through personal memory and observation, considering the economic pressures, environmental consequences, and human relationships embedded in systems of work.

Illegal gold mining, widely known in Ghana as “galamsey,” is central to his practice. Through paintings, sculptures, installations, and photographic documentation, Mensah explores the communities shaped by mining and poses difficult questions about who benefits from natural-resource extraction and who ultimately bears its social and environmental costs.

Migration is another recurring concern. His movement between Ghana and the United States offers a framework for examining how people, materials, resources, and economic power circulate across borders. In his work, personal histories serve as entry points into broader conversations about globalization and geopolitics.

Mensah’s growing professional profile has been strengthened by competitive opportunities. In 2026, he was selected through an international open call for the Penland Winter Art Residency Fellowship and the Windgate Fellowship. In 2025, he received the Dean’s Award as First Runner-Up in the University of Florida Juried Exhibition, where his work was evaluated by Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, Chief Curator of the Orlando Museum of Art.

He has also undertaken competitive, fully funded residencies, including at the Nicholson Project in Washington, D.C., and at Penland School of Arts and Crafts in North Carolina. For Mensah, art serves as both witness and inquiry—a means of making visible the human stories hidden within labor, migration, and systems of power.

Mensah’s work has been exhibited in a range of competitive and juried exhibitions in the United States and Ghana. His exhibition history includes presentations in Wellsville, New York; Orlando, Florida; Washington, D.C.; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Sarasota, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; Gainesville, Florida; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; and Ghana.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

At first glance, Nkwaye’s So Real – Surreal seems to inhabit the familiar territory of portraiture. Look closer, however, and the exhibition begins to unsettle expectations.

Presented at The Dei Center in Accra, the exhibition brings together a compelling body of watercolor and ink paintings that transform recognizable African figures, gestures, and environments through exaggeration, symbolism, and surreal intervention.

Nkwaye’s portraits are less concerned with merely recording appearances than with revealing states of mind. Faces become expressive territories, and gestures and unusual juxtapositions suggest stories unfolding beyond the picture plane. His subjects appear to inhabit an Africa that is both familiar and imagined—rooted in everyday experience yet pushed toward an alternative, almost futuristic reality.

This tension between the real and the surreal is particularly effective because of his use of watercolor. Often associated with delicacy and translucency, the medium can be notoriously demanding when used to achieve detailed realism.

Indeed, he exploits that difficulty to remarkable effect. Layer upon layer of washes creates tonal depth, while ink reinforces selected details and gives his compositions a graphic precision. The result is work that may initially appear light and fluid but rewards sustained looking.

Among the exhibition’s most intriguing elements is Ansah’s recurring fascination with gorillas and other simian figures. Rather than treating these creatures as symbols of primitivity, he presents them as embodiments of strength, patience, and self-mastery.

His gorilla is muscular, monumental, and contemplative, often seeming to weigh its response to the noise and pressures around it. The imagery consequently becomes a meditation on restraint, confidence, and personal transformation.

Nkwaye’s interest in Afro-futurism further expands the exhibition’s imaginative possibilities. His imagined African futures are not distant fantasies but extensions of the present, in which native and urban identities coexist in unconventional settings. The paintings suggest an Africa capable of envisioning itself beyond inherited visual and cultural conventions.

What ultimately distinguishes So Real – Surreal is its refusal to settle comfortably within a single aesthetic category. Ansah moves among portraiture, expressionism, realism, and surrealism, using each to complicate the others. His figures stare, gesture, and remain remarkably still, yet the worlds around them seem to move constantly.

Undeniably, these works invite viewers to look beyond surface likeness and consider the psychological and cultural worlds contained within a face, a gesture—or even a gorilla. So Real – Surreal is therefore not merely an exhibition of accomplished watercolors; it is an imaginative proposition about African identity, perception, and possibility.

The exhibition ends on Sunday, August 30, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Grief can reshape one’s relationship with place. Familiar streets become repositories of memory, colors take on emotional weight, and the ordinary becomes charged with the presence of those no longer there. In Son of Kafui, Gabriel Selassie Tsagli transforms this intimate experience of loss into a compelling visual meditation on memory, belonging, and return.

Presented by Gallery 1957 and curated by Marina Paulenka, the exhibition marks Tsagli’s first solo presentation in Accra. It is also a homecoming of sorts for the Ghanaian artist, who lives and works between Accra and Berlin. Created after his return to Accra in 2025, the new body of paintings draws deeply on the emotional terrain of a city that is both his birthplace and a remembered landscape.

The title is especially revealing. Kafui, the name of Tsagli’s late mother, becomes more than a personal reference; it provides the exhibition’s emotional foundation. Through her memory, the artist explores inheritance, love, grief, and the complex transition from son to father.

Color is central to this exploration. Orange suggests movement and vitality, while blue introduces moments of contemplation and spaciousness. Yet Tsagli’s paintings resist a straightforward symbolic reading. Figuration and abstraction overlap, allowing bodies, faces, and fragments to emerge and recede like recollections. His mother appears not merely as a subject to be represented but as a recurring presence within an evolving emotional landscape.

Accra, meanwhile, becomes more than a backdrop. The city becomes a living presence, evolving alongside the artist’s understanding of home. This is especially significant for an artist whose life has been shaped by movement between Ghana and Germany. In Tsagli’s work, displacement does not necessarily entail rejecting place; instead, it complicates belonging, making home something continually negotiated through memory.

His multidisciplinary practice—spanning painting, music, performance, video and movement—also informs the paintings’ rhythmic quality. They seem to function less as fixed narratives than as emotional spaces, inviting viewers to inhabit uncertainty, movement and remembrance.

Son of Kafui ultimately succeeds because it does not try to resolve grief. Instead, it gives grief color, form and movement. Tsagli turns personal loss into a broader reflection on how we carry people, places and histories within us. In doing so, the exhibition becomes both an intimate tribute to a mother and a thoughtful meditation on what it means to return home changed.

It ends on Saturday, September 12, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Stars have long held a powerful place in human imagination. They have served as guides for travelers, symbols of destiny, and metaphors for the mysterious forces that shape human life.

In Nsoromma, a group exhibition currently on view at The Mix Art Gallery and featuring selected participants from the Rising Star 2026 cohort, celestial symbolism serves as a point of departure for five emerging artists—Albert Nii Nortey Dowuona, Baaba Sarpong, Christabel Dzandu, Paul Leslie Ahadji and Emmanuel Tetteh—to explore ancestry, identity, spirituality and the complex process of becoming.

The title, Nsoromma, meaning “children of the stars,” immediately establishes the exhibition’s conceptual terrain. Rather than treating the stars as merely decorative or mystical symbols, the exhibition uses them as a metaphorical framework through which the artists examine the forces—visible and invisible—that shape individual lives. 

The resulting works move between the personal and the universal, inviting viewers to consider how family, community, history and place shape the construction of identity. Across painting, installation, and mixed media, the exhibition reveals an emerging generation negotiating the relationship between inherited traditions and contemporary artistic experimentation.

Cultural memory is not presented as something fixed or securely preserved in the past. Instead, it appears as something continually reconstructed through experience. This gives Nsoromma much of its relevance: its artists are not merely looking backward for cultural references, but examining how those references survive, change and acquire new meanings in the present.

Themes of migration, ritual, spirituality, and self-discovery further complicate the exhibition. They suggest lives shaped by movement—across places, generations, belief systems, and states of belonging. In this context, the idea of a constellation becomes particularly effective.

Individual stars may appear isolated, yet their significance emerges through relationships and patterns. Similarly, the five artistic voices gain resonance through their differences as much as through their shared concerns.

What distinguishes Nsoromma is its refusal to impose a single interpretation on these questions. Thus, the exhibition leaves room for uncertainty, reflection, and personal discovery. Its invitation to viewers to “find their own cosmologies” transforms the gallery into a space for contemplation rather than mere observation.

As a showcase of emerging practitioners, Nsoromma presents artistic emergence not as a finished destination but as an unfolding journey. Like the night sky that inspired its title, the exhibition offers multiple points of light—distinct, sometimes distant, yet connected within a larger, ever-expanding constellation.

Organized as part of events marking Accra Art Week, it ends on Wednesday, September 2, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Few living artists have reshaped the language of contemporary sculpture as profoundly as Ghanaian-born Emeritus Professor El Anatsui has.

This remarkable achievement was celebrated with the unveiling of El Anatsui: The Man, the Myth, the Legend at 80 and Counting, a major new publication launched by the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) in collaboration with the University Senior Staff Club.

Held last month at the Princess Alexandra Auditorium in Nsukka under the chairmanship of the Obi of Onitsha (Agbogidi), His Royal Majesty Nnaemeka Achebe, the launch drew academics, artists, traditional and cultural leaders, government officials, students, and members of the international arts community.

According to artsghana sources in Nsukka, the event was more than a ceremonial book launch; it became a reflection on the life of an artist whose practice has transformed discarded materials into some of the most compelling sculptural forms of the past half-century and has placed Africa at the center of global artistic discourse.

Edited by Associate Professor Greg Mbajiorgu and Chikaogwu Kanu, the 411-page volume examines the many dimensions of Anatsui’s life and career. It traces his forty-seven years at the University of Nigeria, during which his teaching and artistic practice helped shape what is now internationally recognized as the Nsukka School of Art.

From this university town in southeastern Nigeria, Anatsui developed a distinctive visual language that challenged conventional definitions of sculpture through monumental installations crafted from bottle caps, aluminum strips, copper wire, and other reclaimed materials.

The publication brings together contributions from more than one hundred scholars, artists, historians, journalists, scientists, cultural practitioners, administrators, and traditional leaders across Africa, Europe, and North America.

Collectively, the essays present Anatsui not only as an artist of extraordinary international standing but also as a mentor, educator, intellectual, institution builder, cultural ambassador, and philanthropist whose influence extends well beyond the exhibition space.

One highlight of the launch was a critical review by Professor Chris Uchenna Agbedo, who called the volume both a cultural archive and an important contribution to African intellectual history. The book captures the evolution of an artist whose work has become synonymous with transformation, sustainability, memory, and the reimagining of material culture.

The publication also reaffirms Nsukka’s central role in contemporary African art history. Through Anatsui’s career, the university has become a destination for curators, researchers, collectors, and artists worldwide, demonstrating how local artistic communities can generate ideas with global resonance.

Appearing at a time when institutions are increasingly reassessing the place of African artists in the international canon, El Anatsui: The Man, the Myth, the Legend at 80 and Counting arrives as both a scholarly resource and a timely tribute.

More than documenting an exceptional career, it affirms El Anatsui’s place among the defining artists of our time and underscores African modernism’s enduring contribution to the global history of contemporary art.

Present at the ceremony were Rt. Hon. Chidi Obeta (Member of the Federal House of Representatives), Emeritus Prof. Uche Azikiwe (Formerly of the Faculty of Education – UNN), Justice Prof. Peter Umeadi (Former Chief Judge of Anambra State), Prof. Mike Onyia (1st Deputy Vice Chancellor – UNN), and Dr. Obi Asika (Director General and CEO of the National Council for Arts and Culture). 

Others include Dr. Mrs. Virgy Anohu – Linguistic Strategist / Bank Executive (Adadioramma), HRH Eze Ifeanyi Ekeh (Udumeze III of Lopkanta), and Chief Loretta Aniagolu (Director – FIT Consult Group of Companies).

Pix – Courtesy of the artist

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

There is a quiet confidence running through Weight of the Ordinary, the latest group exhibition currently on view at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra.

Rather than seeking spectacle or grand narratives, the exhibition draws attention to the overlooked rhythms of everyday life, revealing how familiar spaces, objects and routines quietly shape memory, identity and social experience.

Featuring five emerging artists—Josiah Tsibu Manu, Priscilla Agbeti, Blanche Boni-Mississo, King David Osabutey (Kakalicka) and Sena Burgundy Appau—the exhibition shows that the ordinary is anything but mundane. Through diverse media, including painting, weaving, sculpture, installation and assemblage, the artists transform everyday experiences into compelling artistic investigations.

The exhibition succeeds by avoiding the romanticization of the commonplace. Instead, it presents the everyday as a dynamic site where histories are preserved, social systems are negotiated, and personal identities continually evolve. The curatorial framework is cohesive, allowing each artist to pursue distinct concerns while contributing to a broader conversation about contemporary life.

Josiah Tsibu Manu offers one of the exhibition’s most poignant contributions, transforming domestic interiors into repositories of collective memory. Family photographs, furniture, and decorative elements become visual archives, suggesting that living rooms often preserve histories absent from official narratives. His work speaks eloquently to the emotional architecture of home.

Equally compelling is Priscilla Agbeti’s engagement with woven textiles. Her intentionally unfinished works reveal the enduring legacies of labor embedded in everyday materials. Rather than presenting weaving as a finished craft, she leaves histories open-ended, inviting viewers to reflect on the persistence of exploitation and inherited systems that continue to shape contemporary society.

Blanche Boni-Mississo extends the conversation into the realm of spatial politics. Her translucent installations subtly reveal how movement, accessibility, and participation are governed by invisible structures. The work invites physical engagement while prompting broader questions about inclusion and exclusion across public and private spaces.

King David Osabutey, known as Kakalicka, introduces a speculative dimension through hybrid figures inspired by Akan cosmology. His recurring stranger, the Ɔhɔhoɔ, serves as a powerful metaphor for displacement and belonging, linking indigenous knowledge to contemporary anxieties about identity and migration.

Meanwhile, Sena Burgundy Appau’s monumental blue figures offer a contemplative conclusion. Suspended between certainty and transformation, they embody the possibilities of human becoming, reminding audiences that extraordinary potential often lies within ordinary existence.

Installed with restraint and clarity, Weight of the Ordinary rewards slow looking. Rather than overwhelming viewers with visual excess, it invites careful reflection on the unnoticed structures that shape everyday life.

In doing so, the exhibition affirms Nubuke Foundation’s ongoing commitment to presenting thoughtful contemporary art that resonates with local realities and universal human experience. It lingers long after one leaves the gallery, demonstrating that the greatest artistic revelations often arise from life’s most familiar moments.

The exhibition ends on Saturday, August 29, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Kumasi – Ghana)

An exhibition of artworks titled I call upon these persons here present to witness that…, by Gideon Kobbla Hanyame, quietly transforms an ordinary domestic object into a profound meditation on purity, labor, and transformation. 

The exhibition, which ended on Friday, July 17, at the Sculpture Auditorium, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi), centered on string-wound water filters, challenging the assumption that purity is untouched or uncontaminated. Instead, it argues that becoming “pure” is itself a process of exchange, sacrifice, and stain.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the paradox of the filter. It begins pristine and white, yet fulfills its purpose only by absorbing impurities. The cleaner the water becomes, the more visibly the filter changes. Hanyame seizes on this contradiction, elevating staining from an unwanted residue to an artistic language. In his hands, stain becomes evidence of labor, encounter, and transformation.

The exhibition is less concerned with presenting discrete artworks than with creating a constellation of experiences. The installation strategy rejects hierarchy, with no prescribed beginning or end.

Visitors are invited to move freely among the works, entering and exiting through multiple points, allowing each person to chart their own path through the exhibition. This refusal of a singular viewpoint mirrors the artist’s broader argument that identity, meaning, and form are always in flux.

Materially, the works are compelling. Hanyame draws on local craft traditions and collaborative practices, incorporating dyed filter yarns, flour sacks, mirror frames and textile techniques into forms that hover between painting, tapestry and sculpture.

The use of tie-dye methods associated with local dyeing communities, along with collaborations with mirror-frame craftsmen, situates the work firmly within vernacular practices while pushing those traditions into contemporary conceptual territory.

Labor is everywhere visible. Unwrapping, stitching, perforating, dyeing, printing, and transferring become ritual acts that leave traces of effort and time. These gestures produce what the artist calls Nusia—“a thing” in Ewe—objects that resist easy classification and remain in a constant state of becoming.

What makes this exhibition particularly resonant is its insistence that impurity is not failure. Stain is not corruption but transformation. In a world increasingly obsessed with perfection and purification, Hanyame proposes something more complex: that our encounters, our labor, and even our contaminations are precisely what make us whole.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Ghanaian artist Ebenezer Christian confronts one of the country’s most pressing environmental crises with striking clarity in his 13-piece series, The Ambiguity of Mask.

Instead of depicting the visible devastation caused by illegal mining, popularly known as galamsey in Ghana, Christian shifts attention to a more elusive subject—the hidden power structures that sustain the practice.

At first glance, the sculptural masks appear to represent the miners who work at excavation sites across the country. Crafted from discarded mining tools, damaged safety gear, and other scavenged industrial materials, the works possess an unsettling physicality. Their weathered surfaces bear the scars of labor, danger, and environmental destruction, transforming industrial waste into compelling artistic statements.

Yet the artist’s inquiry extends beyond appearances. The masks become metaphors for concealment, prompting viewers to reconsider who truly benefits from Ghana’s illegal mining economy.

He suggests that the individuals seen operating excavators and digging pits are often only the visible actors in a much larger network. Behind them, he points to landlords, traditional authorities, financiers, and political actors whose influence frequently remains obscured from public scrutiny.

Titled We Know Within, the work reinforces this central argument. It suggests a collective awareness that responsibility for environmental degradation extends far beyond those working at the mining sites.

Like the disguise worn by an undercover journalist, the masks conceal identities while inviting deeper investigation. The artist cleverly reverses the traditional symbolism of the mask: instead of revealing cultural identity or spiritual meaning, these masks hide accountability.

His use of ready-made materials is particularly effective. The recovered mining equipment carries its own history, embedding the realities of extraction directly into each sculpture. This approach not only underscores the environmental consequences of galamsey but also demonstrates how contemporary African artists continue to use recycled materials to address urgent social and political issues.

What distinguishes Christian’s work is its refusal to offer simplistic narratives. Rather than assigning blame solely to miners, he urges audiences to interrogate the economic and political systems that perpetuate environmental exploitation. In doing so, the artwork becomes less an indictment of individuals and more a broader critique of complicity and institutional failure.

The Ambiguity of Mask is a timely intervention in Ghana’s ongoing conversation about environmental justice. Through inventive material choices and layered symbolism, he transforms discarded objects into powerful visual testimonies that urge viewers to look beyond the masks and confront the hidden faces behind one of the nation’s most destructive crises.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Ghanaian artist Adam Tata Gasakor invites audiences on an introspective journey through Echoes of Presence, a solo exhibition meditating on the enduring traces people leave behind, now on view at The Mix Design Gallery in Accra.

Rather than presenting straightforward narratives, the exhibition unfolds as an emotional landscape in which memory, identity and human connection are expressed through color, texture and gesture.

Gasakor’s paintings reject literal representation in favor of an intuitive visual language. Rich layers of pigment, expressive brushwork, and tactile surfaces create compositions that seem to oscillate between abstraction and suggestion. The works resist immediate interpretation, inviting viewers to linger and discover their own emotional associations in each canvas.

The exhibition is grounded in the idea that presence extends beyond physical existence. Memories, relationships, and shared experiences continue to shape lives long after the moments have passed. This concept runs throughout the exhibition, with each painting serving as a repository of remembered encounters and unseen histories. Rather than illustrating specific events, the artist lets emotion itself become the subject.

One of the exhibition’s strengths is its openness. The artist’s spontaneous working process gives the paintings an organic quality, allowing colors and textures to evolve naturally across the canvas.

This freedom translates into works that feel both intimate and universal. Viewers are not led to fixed meanings but are instead encouraged to engage in personal reflection, bringing their own experiences into dialogue with the artworks.

The exhibition statement describes the paintings as spaces of contemplation, and this intention is realized effectively. The visual rhythm of the works creates moments of quiet reflection, balancing the visible with the implied. Questions of belonging, resilience, and shared humanity emerge subtly rather than didactically, making the exhibition emotionally accessible without sacrificing conceptual depth.

Set within the contemporary setting of The Mix Design Hub, the exhibition demonstrates Ghana’s contemporary painters’ growing confidence in addressing universal themes through distinct personal vocabularies.

Indeed, Gasakor’s work joins a broader conversation among artists exploring memory, identity, and the psychological dimensions of abstraction, while remaining rooted in an individual practice grounded in intuition and emotional honesty.

Echoes of Presence ultimately succeeds by prioritizing feeling over certainty. It reminds viewers that art can preserve more than images—it can safeguard emotions, relationships, and the invisible marks that define human experience.

In a cultural moment often dominated by spectacle, Gasakor offers something quieter yet equally compelling: an invitation to pause, remember, and recognize the echoes that continue to shape who we are long after the moment has passed.

The exhibition concludes on Tuesday, August 4, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures, curated by Nuna Adisenu-Doe and Kwamena Boison and currently on view at the La Foundation for the Arts Gallery, transforms a familiar Ghanaian social label into an expansive meditation on movement, identity, and material transformation.

Rather than treating “kubolor” as a dismissive term for aimlessness, the artist Kwabena Ofe Gideon Amponsah reclaims it as a philosophy of exploration, resilience, and creative freedom. At the heart of the exhibition is Amponsah’s compelling use of tufting, a medium he taught himself after discovering the technique online. The resulting textile works have a tactile immediacy that invites close inspection.

Richly textured silhouettes, layered yarn compositions, and wearable forms reveal an artist fascinated by process as much as by product. The physical qualities of tufting—its ability to produce imagery on both sides of a fabric—serve as a subtle metaphor for duality, suggesting that identities, like textiles, are never confined to a single surface.

Equally significant is Amponsah’s engagement with discarded textiles from Accra’s renowned Kantamanto Market. These materials bear traces of their previous lives as they are reimagined as artworks, garments, and sculptural installations.

Their transformation reflects broader conversations about sustainability, consumption, and circular economies, while firmly grounding the exhibition in Ghana’s vibrant urban landscape. The artist demonstrates that waste is not an endpoint but the beginning of new aesthetic possibilities.

The collaboration with the fashion label DARKOS expands the exhibition beyond conventional gallery practice. Garments function not merely as clothing but as extensions of the artworks, dissolving distinctions among fashion, sculpture, and performance. Questions of gender, self-expression, and belonging are explored through contemporary silhouettes that prompt viewers to reconsider how the body becomes a vessel for storytelling.

Installation plays an equally important role. Inspired by the improvised display systems of Kantamanto’s traders and street hawkers, garments and textile works are suspended, layered, and assembled with an intentional informality.

The gallery echoes the marketplace’s organized chaos while evoking the theatricality of a fashion runway. This interplay between commerce and spectacle enriches the viewing experience, positioning everyday display methods as forms of artistic choreography.

KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures succeeds because it resists easy categorization. It is at once an exhibition about migration, sustainability, fashion, and identity, yet ultimately it is a celebration of creative adaptability. By elevating overlooked materials and reclaiming a culturally loaded identity, Amponsah presents wandering not as a sign of displacement but as a vital means of discovery.

It ends on Monday, July 27, 2026.