Artist, curator, and art historian Atta Kwami defines “Kumasi Realism” as a kind of representational painting inspired by a plurality of sources. Distinctly local, it is drawn equally from Ghanaian and European art histories, mass-produced advertising and photography, as well as from Ghanaian history, culture, and current events. In Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism, Kwami argues that in Kumasi, Ghana, both college-educated artists and those trained in the city's hundred-plus sign shops draw from this shared visual vocabulary. Exploding the categorical divisions between academically trained and “street” painters often present in the West—launched nearly three decades ago by the exhibitions “Magiciens de la Terre” and “Africa Explores”—Kwami argues for the simultaneous contemporaneity of both groups of painters by claiming each as practitioners of Kumasi Realism.
Declaring that “in Kumasi painting is unavoidable,” Kwami claims his book to be the first to systematically document the medium of painting in...