Fowler Museum at UCLA

How Do You See This World? is a retrospective of paintings by the prolific Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto (b. 1950). Addressed as “Almighty” by friends and acquaintances, Akoto is the owner of Almighty God Art Works in the city of Kumasi, the capital of the Asante kingdom. His studio, established in 1972, produced signs for small businesses, cloth banners for evangelical events, and tin portraits for grave monuments. As the market for such works shrank, Akoto turned his attention to another part of his practice, which he calls “creativity arts”—the focus of the current exhibition. These pictures are produced largely for an international clientele and range in subject from portraiture to Christian themes to commentaries on the world’s problems. Almighty continued to apply his sign-writing skills in the form of extensive texts added to his paintings and their frames. Nearly every piece in the exhibition combines image and text, an interplay characteristic of Akan arts of southern Ghana. The universe of themes in Almighty’s repertoire continues to expand as he widens the scope of his commentaries on the human condition. His recognition has also grown: since 1995, he has been included in at least thirty exhibitions of contemporary African art outside of Ghana: in Italy, Poland, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Portugal, and the U.S. His works are held in museums and private collections worldwide.