Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana

Art, honor, and ridicule are the three lenses through which a viewer might read the messages stitched onto the surface of each asafo flag. Particularly popular among international audiences over the last forty years, asafo flags (frankaa) derived their form from European flags that decorated forts and vessels since the fifteenth century. Curated by Silvia Forni, this exhibition was constructed on field research ranging from 1974 to 2015 but also responded to the spread of asafo imagery through Peter Adler's formative Asafo!: African Flags of the Fante (1993), catalogs of flags sold by Sotheby's, and contemporary material culture. While some of the thirty-five flags in the exhibition were original, many were recreations of older flags (a standard practice of replacing originals that are sold or worn through performance) or new commissions (Fig. 2). As a whole, the exhibition excelled at balancing analyses of particular objects...