Biography

“The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating, and showing new ways to approach blackness.”

Amoako Boafo (b. Ghana, 1984) is known for his large-scale portraits of Black subjects rendered in bold, gestural strokes. Using his fingers to paint his subjects’ bodies and brushes for their clothes, and for the background, Boafo has diverged from academic traditions with a distinctive, contemporary style of his own. Boafo is widely collected by private and public collectors and institutions, most recently by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Rubell Museum. He is currently working to start an artist residency in Accra, Ghana using his newfound resources to support the local arts community in his hometown.