Atta Kwami

Atta Kwami was a Ghanaian painter, printmaker, art historian and curator. His paintings improvise with colour and form, drawing on Ghanaian roadside architecture and on the strip-woven textiles of the Asante and Ewe, including kente. His work is held or has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museum of Ghana.

Early life and education

He was born George Atta Kwami on 14 September 1956 in Accra, the son of Robert Kwami, a music teacher, and the painter and sculptor Grace Kwami, one of Ghana's first generation of modern artists. He studied at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where he later taught. In 2007 he earned a PhD in art history from the Open University; his thesis became the book Kumasi Realism, 1951 to 2007: An African Modernism (Hurst, 2013).

Career

He was the first Thoyer Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University in 2008, held the Philip L. Ravenhill Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2010 and was artist-in-residence at the University of Michigan in 2011. In 2021 he won the Maria Lassnig Prize, awarded by the Maria Lassnig Foundation in Vienna with the Serpentine Galleries in London.

Personal life and death

In 1992 he married the painter and printmaker Pamela Clarkson, whom he met when she set up a printmaking studio at the KNUST College of Art. They divided their time between Kumasi and Loughborough in England. He died of cancer in the UK on 6 October 2021.