ACCRA!

Guest Curator Myron Beasley
May 7 – June 25, 2026

About This Exhibition

Ghanaian culture portrays portraiture as a meaningful way to honor subjects through a wide variety of media, reflecting the fluidity and movement of memory and history. This show features six contemporary artists from the Artemartis collective in Accra, who offer a snapshot of everyday life and the city’s social and cultural identity. The portraits are vibrant, detailed, and symbolic, set against backdrops of richly textured materiality that often involves the use of discarded elements. James Mishio minutely manipulates fabric strips from fashion designers and tailors, Kwaku Yaro repuposes packaging materials such as single-use shopping bags, and Courage Hunke creates collages from old newspapers, rubber, and plastic waste to construct portraits. The artists signaling a sartorial futurity, asseverating a national pride.

About the Artist

Born in Tel Aviv, Myron M. Beasley, Ph.D., teaches American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Bates College. He is also an international curator and cultural critic. His curatorial projects include the first Haitian Biennale, Dark’art, Print Protest Power, and Re.Past.Malaga. He is the author of Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora (Routledge Press). He has received prestigious awards and fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Davis Family Foundation, the Reed Foundation, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Recently, he was honored with the Constance H. Carson Public Humanities Prize from the Maine Humanities.