Atta Kwami (14 September 1956 – 6 October 2021) was a Ghanaian painter, printmaker, independent art historian and curator. He was educated and taught at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, and in the United Kingdom. He created works that improvise form and colour and speak to uniquely Ghanaian architecture and African strip-woven textiles, including those of the Kente, the Ewe and Asante of Ghana. Born George Atta Kwami in 1956 in Accra to Robert Kwami, a music teacher, and prominent first generation Ghanaian contemporary artist Grace Kwami (nee Anku), he studied, and later taught, at the KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana. In 2007 he received a PhD in art history at the Open University for his work for contemporary Ghanaian artists, now published as Kumasi Realism, 1951–2007: An African Modernism (Hurst & Company, 2013). Kwami also held the Philip L. Ravenhill Fellowship (UCLA) at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, from 1 March to 31 May 2010. Between 14 and 26 August 2011, he undertook the Howard Kestenbaum/Vijay Paramsothy International Fellowship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine, USA. Kwami’s work has been exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, National Museum of African Art, National Museum of Ghana, National Museum of Kenya, Victoria and Albert Museum, the World Museum, and the British Museum. In 1992, Kwami married Pamela Clarkson, a painter and printmaker who he had met in 1991 when she set up a printmaking studio at the College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. They divided their time between Kumasi, Ghana, and Loughborough, United Kingdom. He died of cancer in the UK on 6 October 2021.
