Atta Kwami

Statement for the Afro Comb Project: It is encouraging for my practice to be collaborating on the project, 6000 years of the AFRO COMB. The comb as an aesthetic object has multiple usage, content and possibilities. A wonderful opportunity to re-interpret a vast array of combs from across the African continent.

Atta Kwami, 2013

Biography

Atta Kwami is a painter, printmaker, independent art historian and curator. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme, Art and Museums in Africa (2012/2013). He completed his Ph. D. in Art History at The Open University in 2007. As a Senior Lecturer, he taught painting and printmaking from 1986 to 2006 at the College of Art, KNUST, Kumasi.

A number of his paintings hang in major public collections including the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya, the V&A Museum, London, the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Newark Museum, USA, The Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan Museum of Art and The British Museum.

Kwami’s other awards include:

• Howard Kestenbaum/Vijay Paramsothy International Fellowship, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, USA (14th - 26th August 2011)
• Janet L. Stanley ACASA Travel Award to attend the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium on African Art: Africa and its Diasporas in the Market Place: Cultural Resources and the Global Economy, Univerity of California, Los Angeles. (23rd - 26th March 2011)
• Artist in Residence, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA; Roman J. Witt Visitor, Graduate School of Art & Design. (16th - 28th January 2011)
• Philip L. Ravenhill Fellowship, (UCLA) ; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC. (1st March - 31st May 2010) 1st Thoyer Distinguished Visiting Scholar, New York University, New York. (30th September - 8th October 2008)