Unbecoming with Yulia Mahr

Emann Odufu: Amoako, I’ve been thinking about your work in terms of cultural export. Maybe even art diplomacy. Not in terms of medium, but in the way someone like Bob Marley exported Jamaican culture globally through music.

With these exhibitions, it feels like you’re carrying Ghana into two very different spaces at once, Los Angeles and Venice. Do you think about your work that way at all, or is that something that only becomes visible from the outside? Larry and Bennett, I’d love for you both to jump in as well.

Amoako Boafo: I create first and foremost for myself and the people around me. I don’t necessarily think about the work in that larger context, but I do make it in a way that allows different people to dream through it differently.

Larry might connect to the work one way. Bennett another way. I like keeping the work open enough for those different readings to exist.

Larry Ossei-Mensah: What I love about Amoako’s work is that it begins from a deeply personal place, his community, the people around him, the people he admires.

I think what you’re describing as cultural export is really a byproduct of the honesty of the practice. At its core he’s really just exporting possibilities. 

Bennett Roberts: Before working with Amoako, I knew very little about Ghana. Sometimes it takes a singular artist to open up entirely new conversations.

The Western canon was very narrow for a long time, and artists like Amoako help expand that territory and allow other voices to enter the conversation equally.

LOM: What’s important is that he’s doing it on his own terms. He’s making the work he wants to make and continuing to challenge himself.

The Roberts Projects exhibition especially felt like stepping into his universe. Bringing elements of the studio into the exhibition allowed viewers to experience where the paintings actually come from. 

EO: Yes, Amoako, in the Roberts Projects exhibition, you literally exported a piece of home into another space.

So, I’m curious what it meant to bring your studio environment from Accra into the exhibition itself, especially since architecture seems increasingly important to your practice.

AB: LA has been a space where a lot happened for me creatively, but I wanted Accra to remain part of the conversation. So often paintings leave home, get shipped abroad, and never return.

I wanted collectors to understand the space the work was actually made in. It wasn’t about reinventing my practice. It was about extending the conversation. Architecture became a collaborative way to dream further and shape the energy I wanted people to feel.

EO: Your work has always been rooted in portraiture, but it feels like the portraits are doing something different now, less about depiction and more about presence or interiority.

How has your relationship to portraiture shifted over time?

AB: I actually don’t think it has fundamentally changed. Earlier you referenced Bob Marley, and I think that comparison makes sense in terms of expression. Marley used reggae as his language to communicate everything.

Portraiture is my language. Every painting carries a different feeling, movement, and intention, but portraiture remains the vehicle. The challenge of it keeps me thinking and solving problems. So, the language hasn’t changed, but I’m constantly refining it.

LOM: The paintings almost function like a diaristic form of expression. Instead of writing poetry, Amoako paints it.

What’s exciting is that the work remains deeply honest. He would paint whether people were looking or not. And over time you begin seeing subtle shifts, embroidery, texture, new materials, expanding the vocabulary of the work without abandoning its foundation.

EO: Your use of finger painting feels instinctive, almost like a return to mark-making before refinement. What’s interesting is seeing that gesture enter spaces like Venice, spaces built around very different ideas of painting and refinement.

Do you think about that tension?

AB: I think first about the characters in the paintings and how to make spaces safe for them. Once you leave the continent, there are different kinds of pressures and struggles.

My responsibility is not simply to place these figures into a space and hope they survive. So when I think about Venice, I think about process and intervention. The architecture and institutions have to adapt to what I’m bringing.

EO: Can you talk a little more about the process?

AB: It’s difficult to fully explain because the process is entirely intuitive. There’s no fixed routine. Sometimes I wake up at 1am and work until sunrise. Sometimes I spend an entire day in the studio without touching a painting because I haven’t found the solution yet.

The process can involve tennis, movement, observation, conversation, seeing someone wearing a certain color combination on the street and suddenly realizing what a painting needs. The work evolves through living.

LOM: I think it’s intuition, improvisation, and observation. Amoako is deeply attentive to movement and daily life.

He’s living life while remaining fully committed to the work, and you can feel that energy in the paintings.

AB: The work is my life, so I cannot neglect it.

BR: What makes the finger painting powerful is that everyone has done it as a child. It creates an immediate bond between the viewer and the work.

What’s important is that it never felt like a gimmick. People respond to the work viscerally before they even intellectualize it.

LOM: A lot of traditional conversations around the canon never seriously considered artists from the continent. What I appreciate about Amoako’s position is that he isn’t adapting himself to the space. The space has to adapt to him.

That’s what makes it an intervention.

EO: And to me that brings it back to the idea of art diplomacy, especially in Venice where artists are representing different cultural identities simultaneously.

The Bob Marley comparison comes back here for me. Marley exported not just music, but Jamaican culture, language, spirituality, and identity globally. Part of Jamaica’s outsized cultural presence comes through that legacy alongside histories like Windrush and migration.

As someone without direct ties to Ghana, I experience your work as offering clues about Ghanaian life and culture, almost as an invitation into that world.

LOM: What anchors all of this is love. There’s love and intentionality embedded in the work.

Sometimes you can’t force people into a conversation directly. You have to draw them in slowly, almost like an Anansi spider weaving a web. And once people enter the work, it begins revealing itself layer by layer.

EO: After a certain point, the work takes on a life of its own beyond you privately. Amoako, how do you navigate that moment where the work becomes larger culturally or historically?

AB: Everything I’ve built, whether dot.atelier or the paintings themselves, I’ve built with the intention that it should outgrow me.

I want there to be an archive and a foundation people can continue building upon after I’m gone. The work comes from an honest and joyful place, and once I share it with the world, what people do with it is ultimately up to them.

EO: Do you think the attention that your work has received in the past few years, has clarified your vision or forced you to protect it more intentionally?

AB: I think I’m always improving. Once you think you’ve arrived, that’s when you begin descending.

The reactions to the work have definitely made me think more carefully about protection, documentation, and preserving the archive around the practice. I want future generations to be able to return to the work and understand what I was actually trying to do.

BR: Once work enters the world, it can take on a life of its own culturally and economically. No artist can fully control that.

What I admire is that Amoako remains grounded in the work itself regardless of outside speculation or market forces.

EO: I want to shift into dot.atelier because it also speaks directly to legacy. Can you talk about how it grew alongside your practice?

AB: dot.atelier combines art and sports because those are the two things that shaped my life. I wanted to create opportunities where people wouldn’t feel they had to leave Ghana in order to succeed.

The foundation supports artistic development, but also tennis incubation and youth programming. At its core, it’s about helping people in my community imagine larger possibilities for themselves.

LOM: What’s exciting is seeing it grow from an idea into a real infrastructure. When I visited recently, there was an artist reconnecting with the Ghanaian diaspora alongside another artist based directly in Ghana. That exchange is incredibly important.

The project is about creating opportunities, resources, and long-term infrastructure for future generations.

EO: Hearing Larry describe the residency and about artists exploring diaspora-continent connections made me think about my own Guyanese background and the quote on quote unspoken Ghana-Guyana connection. In the US people constantly confuse Guyana with Ghana, but there’s also a real diasporic linkage through ancestry and history. A good amount of the Afro- Guyanese population in Guyana can track their roots to Guyana. Also a huge cultural reverence for Gold on both sides. Haha it's sort of a rabbit hole, so I’ll stop there.

It also made me think about the larger emergence of new cultural infrastructures across places like Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Mumbai, or Seoul reshaping contemporary culture and the future of the art world itself. Amoako, I wonder if you see yourself and your work both artistically and with non-profits as part of that movement.

AB: Honestly, I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. My focus was simply on creating opportunities that I wished existed earlier for people back home.

The larger conversations emerged naturally from trying to close that gap.

LOM: I think the conversation is less about emergence and more about recognition. These places were always producing culture. The West is simply catching up.

Artists are realizing they don’t necessarily need validation from traditional Western centers anymore. If the work is powerful enough, people will come to them.

BR: For me, curiosity is everything. The most exciting future is a genuinely global one where new ideas emerge from many different places and experiences rather than a single dominant center.

EO: And Bennett, I think you’ve done an incredible job positioning yourself within that ecosystem and helping connect these conversations globally.

BR: Thank you I’d also say Larry is extremely important because he travels, visits studios, and helps connect these different creative ecosystems. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

EO: I remember first discovering Larry years ago through his  “Young Global” instagram handle years ago and immediately recognizing that he was building a unique perspective through travel, studio visits, and cultural exchange.

Final question for Amoako. What has this Venice body of work required from you mentally, emotionally, even spiritually? Does this moment feel like arrival or transformation?

AB: Lately I’ve been spending much more intimate time with the paintings, sometimes even sleeping in the studio. I’m enjoying the process of problem solving more deeply now.

But I don’t think of Venice as arriving somewhere. I’m still searching. The work is always about finding new solutions. Even when I’m playing tennis or moving through daily life, I’m subconsciously thinking about the paintings and how to make them breathe differently.

For me, the process is everything.

BR: I see Venice as another step upward, another platform within an ongoing progression.

LOM: I agree. It’s another building block. Amoako is deeply self-motivated and constantly challenges himself creatively.

Like Kobe preparing for the final shot, the work comes from years of discipline and repetition. When the moment arrives, it’s simply another shot he’s prepared for all along.