Folkestone Triennial 2021

Atta Kwami is a painter, printmaker, and art historian. He studied, and later taught, at the KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana. In 2007 he received a PhD in art history at the Open University for his work for contemporary Ghanaian artists, now published as Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007: An African Modernism. (Hurst & Company, 2013).

In Folkestone, Atta Kwami will presents two three dimensional artworks that incorporate his signature use of colour and abstract painting style. An imposing but joyful archway will stand at the junction of 4 pathways in the centre of the Harbour Arm. And a very different group of sculptures derived from traditional West African street vending kiosks will be grouped on Castle Hill Avenue near to the Civic Centre.

Atta Kwami has exhibited internationally, mostly in Africa, Europe and the US; he has published articles in exhibition catalogues, scholarly volumes and journals. Atta Kwami was a visiting fellow at the Cambridge/Africa Research programme 2012-2013. More recently he has contributed to A Companion to Textile Culture (edited by Jennifer Harris, Wiley Blackwell, (2020), and the journal Critical Interventions: Journal of African art history and visual culture, (2020). He was a visiting artist at MOMA, New York 2020, and in the same year exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, New York and Thami Mnyele Foundation, Amsterdam.

He is represented by Beardsmore Gallery, London and Nicolas Krupp Gallery, Basel, Switzerland. In 2021 he will receive the Maria Lassnig Prize.

For more information please visit Creative Folkestone.