Experience the beauty and complexity of Blackness in Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo’s debut solo museum exhibition Soul of Black Folks. Working primarily in portraiture, Boafo uses vibrant color and textured finger painting to tell stories of Black subjectivity, Black joy, and the Black gaze. Inspired in part by W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk, the exhibition explores the concept of “double consciousness,” in which Black people must navigate their self-identity through the gaze of others. Boafo’s powerful and engaging figures—created between 2016 and 2022 and influenced by modern variables including the COVID-19 pandemic, the media’s commodification of Black bodies, and continued systemic oppression—are raw, intimate, and energetic as they come alive via carefully sculpted layers of paint. Together, Boafo’s portraits form a vivid assemblage of Black life around the world.
Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is presented in partnership between Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. The exhibition is curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah.
