Image: Amoako Boafo, Bella Sontez, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

Join us for a conversation with artist Amoako Boafo and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah. Boafo and Ossei-Mensah will discuss works in The Soul of Black Folks and explore the varying strategies that Boafo employs within his practice to capture the essence of the Black figure. Boafo creates paintings that actively center Black subjectivity, Black joy, and the Black gaze. He and Ossei-Mensah will touch on his career leading to this premier museum solo exhibition, and how his work inspires and teaches us about Black life and humanity.

‍This event will take place on the Member's Preview day and is open to MoAD members only. Become a member today!

‍You can pre-register for this Artist Talk here. MoAD will be implementing a timed-ticketing system soon and if you pre-register, we will contact you about timed entry.

Amoako Boafo was born on the 10th of May, 1984 and raised in Osu, Accra – Ghana. He studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2007, before attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria.

Boafo was awarded with the jury prize, Walter Koschatzky Art Prize in 2017 and the STRABAG Art award International in 2019 both in Vienna, Austria.

Also in 2019, he was the first artist-in-residency at the new Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida and collaborated with Kim Jones, Dior Men’s creative director, for Dior’s Spring/Summer 2021 Men Collection in 2020. In 2021 Boafo was selected by Uplift Aerospace to create the inaugural “Suborbital Triptych” on the exterior panels of a Blue Origin New Shepard space rocket.

Widely collected by prestigious private and public collectors and institutions, most recently by Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis MN; the Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Marieluise Hessel Collection, the Aishti Foundation, Antelias, Lebanon; Centre for Curatorial Studies, Berlin, Germany; Hessel Museum of Art, New York NY, the Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio and the Albertina Museum in Vienna among others.

Boafo is regarded as a notable young voice in art of the African diaspora through his approaches to the celebration of Blackness by shaping of Black forms and their dispositions in a larger global context.

Larry Ossei-Mensah uses contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. The Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit spaces around the globe from New York City to Rome. Ossei-Mensah is also the co-founder of ARTNOIR: a global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class.

Ossei-Mensah is the former Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD in Detroit.    Ossei-Mensah currently serves as Curator-at-Large at BAM, where he curated the NY Times heralded the exhibition Let Free Ring in January 2021. He recently organized with Magali Arriola and Christina Li, Art Basel’s first every curated online viewing room -  OVR: Portals.

This fall, Ossei-Mensah will be co-curating the 7th Athens Biennial with OMSK Social Club. In 2019, Ossei-Mensah co-curated Coffee, Rhum, Sugar& Gold:  A Postcolonial Paradox with Dexter Wimberly. Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is his second exhibition at MOAD.

‍Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is presented in partnership with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and on view October 20, 2021 - February 27, 2022.