Ghanaian award-winning portraiture and figurative painter, Amoako Boafo, has been listed by TIME as the ‘rising art world superstar’.
The popular American magazine, released the list for the ‘Next 100 Most Influential People’ in the world today and Amoako Boafo made the list. Introduced in 2019, the ‘Next 100’ list highlights 100 people who are shaping their respective fields in business, entertainment, health and science, sports, activism, and more. Nigerian superstar Davido, American Poet Amanda Gorman, Dualipa, and others made the cut for the enviable list. The youngest person on this year’s list is 16-year-old entertainer, Charli D’Amelio, who counts more than 100 million followers on TikTok.
Amoako Boafo’s work, characterized by bright colors and textured finger painting, highlights Black identity and the African diaspora with complexity and warmth. This distinctive style has made him one of the world’s most in-demand artists and won raves from Kehinde Wiley and Kim Jones, the artistic director of Dior Men, who launched a collaboration with him in 2020, making Boafo the first African artist to develop a line with the French fashion house. Perhaps, this is just as significant as Boafo’s staunch unwillingness to being exploited by white collectors who are now hungry for Black creativity.
Amid Boafo’s swift rise, his work has often been “flipped”, or resold quickly at a much higher price, a practice that can prevent artists from profiting from the huge windfalls of secondary sales. In response, the artist has fought to establish more control over his work, both by buying it back and through creating a studio for local creatives in Accra. As a result, Boafo has sparked a larger dialogue about who really profits when Black art is handled by white gatekeepers.
Boafo relocated to Vienna in 2014 to join artist Sunanda Mesquita, who is now his wife. Seeking a more robust art scene, he was initially optimistic about his prospects in the new city. Moving from a predominantly Black country to a white one, Boafo became hyperaware of the ways Black people are perceived and treated in white spaces.
“I thought that Europe, or the West more broadly, is more open to painting, that it’s a career that your parents will not discourage you from going into. But then when I arrived, I had a very difficult time because spaces rejected me, saying they don’t show African painting”.
However, by December 2019, Boafo had caught the attention of esteemed collectors Don and Mera Rubell, who named him the first artist in residence at the newly opened Rubell Museum. At the same time, Boafo’s works were featured at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Mariane Ibrahim. The solo booth of works priced between 15,000 dollars and 45,000 dollars sold out. In September of that year, Ibrahim had also exhibited Boafo’s work at Expo Chicago, where the portrait ‘Steve Mekoudja (2019)’ was acquired by the Hessel Museum of Art.
That aside, Boafo as an artist doesn’t only focus on his artwork as he takes interest in a lot of charity works. He typically gives one or two paintings to benefit auctions annually to help in raising funds for charity. In April 2020, he donated a painting, ‘Aurore Iradukunda, (2020)’, to an online benefit auction supporting the Museum of the African Diaspora during the COVID-19 pandemic. The painting sold in early May for 190,000 dollars, nearly six times its 35,000 dollars estimate.
