![]() The gallery is located between the bustling Makola Market and the statuesque arches in Black Star Square, in a compound of pristine buildings and freshly mowed lawns that starkly contrast with gardens elsewhere, tended by roaming goats. In a city that had previously had no major art museums, Gallery 1957 became a beacon. Then, in 2019, there came a boost in the form of the Year of Return, a government initiative aimed at encouraging the African diaspora to come to Ghana and helping to increase interest in local art.Įven before all that, in 2016, a Lebanese emigré called Marwan Zakhem started a mini-revolution with the opening of Gallery 1957, named for Ghana’s year of independence from Britain. New galleries abroad exhibiting Ghanaian works opened Western eyes to artists who’d been germinating for years. A burgeoning upper-middle class emerged to appreciate local talent. Some used social media to amplify their work, defying traditional attitudes against art as a legitimate profession. Many of Ghana’s young artists found their voices in the years leading up to the Covid pandemic. In Jamestown, the 400-year-old quarter occupied at various times by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, a basketball court is painted like an Ellsworth Kelly colour field. At the Centre for National Culture, also known as the Arts Centre, a grid of stalls spread across the seafront, artisans crouch over ziggurat beadwork. When we leave Artemartis, she takes me to one of its three gallery spaces in the city.Īlong the way, I see more evidence that art is part of the fabric of Accra: it’s in the naive murals on school walls and the hand-drawn billboards for shrimp seasoning. “That is a universal theme in art around the city.”Īraba’s series was commissioned by Gallery 1957, one of the world’s most important spaces dedicated to West African artists. In a new abstract series, Araba used diluted acrylics to convey the physical and psychological toll of that time, “but also the joy and satisfaction in that struggle,” she says. When we meet at Artemartis, she tells me about the region’s ongoing water crisis, which at one point forced her family to live nocturnally, waking at midnight to collect water in buckets while the taps flowed. The work by Accra’s newest art darling, Araba Opoku, is a case in point. “The number of people attending exhibitions is growing. Nurturing curators have coaxed spirited work from the grassroots and boosted the reputation of Ghanaian art worldwide. Galleries like his have multiplied and flourished. In the five years since launching Artemartis, Selasie has watched his artists develop in tandem with a city-wide art boom. Canvases thick with saturated colour and emotion hang from the walls in various stages of completion, echoing the chaos outside. The blue-painted breezeblock cottage is part-workshop, part-gallery and part-crash-pad, providing emerging artists with studio space, supplies, management, hype and, crucially, time to experiment with mediums and concepts. More than four million people live in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, and life here serves up daily obstacles, which is what makes Selasie’s business such a feat. Then, as we crawled down a narrow residential street, a cyclist in a long, white, embroidered boubou teetered into the bumper and toppled in dramatic fashion, prompting a brief detour to the hospital. A policeman stopped us at a barricade for a routine check of the boot. After damaging a tyre on a pothole, Selasie flagged down a guy on the roadside to repair it. An hour ago, he picked me up for a visit to Artemartis, the artists’ collective he runs west of the city centre, but in that time we’ve progressed barely a mile. A preacher delivers a sermon into a megaphone.īeside me, in the driver’s seat, Selasie Gomado is inching along to the petrol station. Women wrapped in hand-loomed fabrics step into the street, balancing giant tubs of kpakpo shito peppers on their heads. Pavements are littered with leather goods. ![]() ![]() ![]() The road past Makola Market is swarming with hawkers. ![]() This article was adapted from National Geographic Traveller (UK) ![]()
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