Atta Kwami is a painter, printmaker, art historian and curator. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme, Art and Museums in Africa (2012/2013). He trained and taught in Kumasi, Ghana and the UK. He has work in major collections including the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya; the V&A Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Newark Museum, USA; The Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin-Madison; University of Michigan Museum of Art and The British Museum. He is the author of Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007: An African modernism (2013).

 

For me, painting remains a medium of originality.  You can hang an exhibition of painting and it either stands or falls because of what has gone before. When I am painting I feel as if I am in conversation with artists from all places.

To have so much history behind you and to succeed in creating an object that people keep coming back to, I think is an achievement. It is a great challenge to restrict yourself to using horizontal and vertical lines, but those limitations can be expanded upon; I work with very broad and varied means of making.

Atta Kwami, 2014.