Amoako Boafo’s art went from selling in hundreds to millions

Amoako Boafo’s most important painting can’t be bought. It also may be the first painting he has made that can’t be bought. It’s called “Deep Pink Sofa,” and it’s a site-specific mural painted on a wall at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where it’s a special feature of the 38-year-old Ghanian artist’s show, “Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks.” In a city where new murals seem to pop up hourly on buildings and sometimes catapult their makers into the indoor art world, Boafo’s wall painting is more of a backpedal. Five years ago, Boafo was selling his paintings for a pittance. He was well-educated, and his art was still a side gig. Then his career went haywire in 2018 — so haywire, that last December, one of his large canvases sold for $3 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong. We’ll get to that back story — which involves Instagram, celebrities and opportunistic collectors — in a bit. “Soul of Black Folks” is Boafo’s first solo museum show, an important validation for any artist who deserves to be more than a flash in the pan of art history. Such a show signifies that an artist merits scholarly study and will still matter in 20, 50, 100 years or more. “Deep Pink Sofa” is the only work in the show that doesn’t belong to private collectors or the artist. After Oct. 2, the mural will disappear under new layers of paint, becoming an unseen part of CAMH’s, and the artist’s, history. All of the paintings on view are bold, colorful and stark portraits of Black figures that leave things to the imagination. The show’s name echoes the title of a seminal early 20th-century essay collection by the American sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who was the first scholar to explore the humanity and culture of African Americans. Boafo’s work represents the nuances of contemporary Black life globally, affirming the dignity, beauty and complexity of the Black body. He is as interested in the image he’s projecting as much as the act of painting, often featuring people he knows (including himself), in poses that exude both self-confidence and vulnerability. His vividly colored canvases hew to a limited palette — mostly yellow, red, pink, green, black and white. He centers his figures within fields of negative space that make the settings both universal and nebulous. He renders parts of bodies as negative space, too, encouraging viewers to fill in the blanks. Most of his paintings have a flat and stationary sensibility, but some get a sense of movement with a layer of photo transfers: He uses densely patterned, floral wrapping paper to create clothing or backgrounds, blending influences that call to mind the European-inspired paintings of American superstar Kehinde Wiley (who figures large in Boafo’s story) and Ghanian textile traditions. We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here. “Dark Pink Sofa” is among the quieter works. It depicts a slender male who’s wearing a pink polo shirt and white pants. The pants and the figure’s crossed legs are suggested by an abstract field of white. The man is relaxing on a dark pink sofa — or rather, the hint of a sofa, made with two horizontal bands of color around the figure — light pink on the top half, dark pink on the bottom. The figure holds one arm near his body and stretches the other out a bit. His gaze doesn’t reveal much, because Boafo hasn’t defined any light falling on the eyes. That was intentional, so the figure gazes at viewers no matter where they are standing. Larry Ossei-Mensah, the show’s guest curator, says Boafo came up with the composition quickly after asking if the bench across from the wall would stay there during the show. The eyes were important, so that as viewers sit and study the painting, it also appears to ask questions of them. You can learn a lot about Boafo’s style and techniques from this painting. But the thing that everyone will remember — the thing that startles you from the first glance — is the distinctive technique he employs to render Black skin. In recent years, a lot of powerful Black portraiture has come to the fore, including the photographs of the South African Zanele Muholi, who explores Black queer identity, and Omar Victor Diop, who has reintroduced long-forgotten heroic figures with costumed self-portraits. Boafo’s skin is just as instantly recognizable as those artists’ works. It may strike some viewers as grotesque. Boafo’s figures practically vibrate on his canvases because he paints their skin with his fingers, creating squiggly, improvisational jolts of energy with burnt umber, Van Dyke brown and ultramarine blue. (Earlier on, he also employed a green.) He does not blend the colors first on a palette. The trope is obvious — all skin is a conglomeration, and no one is purely black, white or yellow — but the tactile result Boafo achieves seems dazzlingly alive, as if the inner lives and thoughts of his subjects are literally crawling across their skin, continuously evolving. You have to see it in person to fully appreciate it. Boafo is so new to the museum scene that during a walk-through before the show opened, Ossei-Mensah kept seeing things he hadn’t noticed before. He had only viewed some of the paintings digitally when he compiled the show, before they arrived in Houston. (“Souls of Black Folk” premiered with about 20 works last October at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, and CAMH’s show adds another 10.) Ossei-Mensah was thrilled to be discovering more in Boafo’s work. “That’s a sign of a great painting,” he said. “It continues to reveal itself even if you’ve been looking at it months or years.” A leading independent curator of Black art, Ossei-Mensah is a super-smart, friendly guy, a first-generation Ghanian American based in New York who also served as Boafo’s spokesman and handler in Houston. He was among those who pushed early to get the artist’s work into museums — “so people can get an expanded view of what he’s attempting to achieve through the work,” he said. “What is he offering us? What can we learn? What new questions should we be asking ourselves when we think about the act of painting, about portraiture, about the Black body, about color, pattern? And also what it means to be vulnerable as an artist, really exposing your inner thoughts.” Each of Boafo’s paintings has a mood, intention, idea and energy behind it, he noted. “You can tell those that have more movement, more velocity. Were those made on those good days? Inspired days? Each painting invites you to ask a question and really spend time with it, try to assess, where’s the brushwork, where’s the finger work?” The show’s oldest painting, 2016’s “Black Skin White Mask,” is a more traditional self-portrait of the artist, nude, reading the Frantz Fanon book of the same name. The figure in 2017’s “Ghana Must Go” also is reading an important book, suggesting the depth of Boafo’s interests. With that painting, you can see Boafo transitioning to the technique that would become his signature, changing his art in profound ways. And with “Reflections 1,” which hangs nearby on the introduction wall, he was gaining more control of his fingers. Ossei-Mensah sees it as “sculpting the skin, building up the surface.” Using his fingers gives Boafo more freedom, “whereas a brush has to be very specific,” he added. Every work in the show is worth a good look. For the most part, they’re anonymous, including self-portraits. Many of the titles reference only the clothing. A few sleepers: The lady in the “Red Dress” is Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the leading institutional champion of visual artists of the African diaspora. Eagle-eyed visitors also will recognize the figures of the large painting “Sunflower Bee Shirt,” from 2021. I probably don’t have to tell you, but it’s adapted from a Tiffany ad featuring Beyoncé and Jay-Z. An artist in demand Like other important art world figures, Ossei-Mensah met Boafo a few years ago through their mutual friend, Wiley. “Once I saw what was happening with his career, I knew it was important that there be an institutional dialogue around this work,” he said. “Because most people were either seeing it online or there were market-driven conversations. There wasn’t enough conversation and scholarship about what he was actually accomplishing.” What makes Boafo’s story sensational is how fast it all happened. Sort of. Boafo has painted since he was a kid growing up in Accra, Ghana. He attended the Ghanatta College of Art and Design before earning a master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna Austria, where he now lives. But he initially earned his living as a tennis pro and coach, selling his paintings for about $100 each. Everything changed in the spring of 2018, when his Instagram feed captured the eye of Wiley, and Wiley alerted his friends, including leading art dealers. Boafo’s first show at Los Angeles’ Roberts Project Gallery, late in 2018, sold out in two days, with works priced at $10,000. Chicago’s Mariane Ibrahim, whose namesake gallery specializes in artists of the African diaspora, first presented Boafo’s work at Art Basel Miami in late 2019; it sold out even faster. Dior’s Kevin Jones tapped the artist to help create the luxury fashion label’s summer 2021 men’s collection, amping up his celebrity another notch. But opportunistic “investment collectors” pounced nimbly, too, coaxing Boafo to sell work to them directly and paying more than the galleries. While it was all a windfall for him, market speculators profited more by flipping his paintings at auction. (Artists don’t generally get a cut of auction profits.) Boafo is using some of his earnings build a residency compound in Osu, the neighborhood of Accra that he grew up in. Akin to Wiley’s program for other artists in Dakar, Senegal, Boafo’s center is not far from the grave of W.E.B. Du Bois. “With all the attention and adulation and pressure, he’s thinking about paying it forward and making sure other artists he came up with are afforded the same opportunity,” Ossei-Mensah says. “For him, success is not him being at the top of the mountain but a multitude of people being at the top of the mountain.” Accra, you may recall, is also where the legendary professor and painter John Biggers found his voice in the late 1950s. More recently, Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus has spent time there. “It’s happening there,” Ossei-Mensah said. “As much as (Amoako’s residency center) is about supporting the community, it’s about creating dialogue; so that when artists like Jamal come, they have a place where they can situate themselves and begin to understand the landscape and how it can potentially inform their practice and how they look at themselves in the world.” Houston collector Lester Marks, who serves on the CAMH’s board of directors, bought three of Boafo’s paintings in 2019 through Los Angeles’ Roberts Projects Gallery. Ossei-Mensah put two of them in the show: “Yellow Pullover” and “Sam.” Marks has collected works by Black artists for years, ranging from paintings by the late Houston artist James Bettison, an up-and-comer in the 1980s who died young; and early works by Trenton Doyle Hancock, who is now an international star. Marks said he began focusing more diligently on artists of color in 2015, as a response to the racially divided political foment that was stirring. He now owns works by seven Ghanian artists. They include another Accra native that Boafo turned him onto, the Portland-based Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, who paints portraits in a similar vein but with different techniques. Marks said he buys new works almost daily and divides them into three classes: “Those that make you say, ‘oh.’ Those that make you say, ‘Oh, my.’ And those where you go, ‘Oh, my god.’” When he stumbled upon Boafo’s work in 2019, it was an immediate, ‘Oh, my god.’ “It simply resonates intelligence and emotion. It means something, reflecting beauty and the inner life of Black persons in poses that are not typical,” Marks said. He calls Boafo “the next Basquiat” — not because Boafo’s paintings look like Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, but because he’s a master doing something different. “I wish people wouldn’t focus on the overnight thing, because I believe in 20 years, Amoako will be just as important,” he said. Looking at “Dark Pink Sofa” drives Marks a little crazy, though. “It’s a multimillion dollar work. I don’t see why I couldn’t cut it off the wall like a Bansky,” he says, impishly. He’s on the museum’s board and knows better. He’s joking, really. But still. Given Boafo’s story, he’s probably not alone in dreaming. Molly Glentzer is a Houston-area writer. - A Houston love story: When the mayor’s daughter met a Captain - Some of the best bands skip Houston for Dallas and Austin. Here's why. - When is the best time to see bluebonnets and wildflowers? - The Chronicle reveals featured designer for 40th anniversary Best Dressed Luncheon - Medical breakthroughs can change your life, here are 10 treatments

Thanks to Instagram exposure, Amoako Boafo’s art went from selling in the hundreds to the millions

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