Abstract

The talk assesses the legacy of Grace Salome Kwami (1923-2006) as a modern Ghanaian artist, educator and mentor. Her varied oeuvre of photographs, textile designs, terracotta figures, pots, portraits, drawings, paintings, decorated calabashes, sculpture, bead work and dress-design are of such a high and consistent standard that people are considering establishing an art museum in her house in Ho, Ghana. Towards the end of her life Grace Kwami spent many months in Kumasi, where she had trained in the 1950s as a Specialist Art Teacher at the Kumasi College of Technology, (now the KNUST ).

Atta Kwami is a Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme, Art and Museums in Africa (2012/2013). He completed his Ph.D. in Art History at The Open University in 2007. As a Senior Lecturer, he taught painting and printmaking from 1986 to 2006 at the College of Art, KNUST , Kumasi. A number of his paintings hang in major public 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 and The British Museum.