Amoako Boafo Acra, Ghana, b. 1984

Amoako Boafo lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
After learning to draw and paint as a child, he enrolled at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, where he graduated in 2008, receiving the award for Best Portraitist of his class.

He has focused his work on the portraiture of Black individuals, who remain underrepresented in contemporary art. Inspired by the expressionist portraiture of artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, his contemporary influences include Jordan Casteel, Maria Lassnig, and Kehinde Wiley.

In 2017, he received the Walter Koschatzky Art Award, and in 2019 the STRABAG International Art Award, both in Vienna. In 2019, I See Me, his first solo exhibition in the United States, opened at Roberts Projects gallery in Los Angeles. That same year, Boafo became the first artist‑in‑residence at the newly inaugurated Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida.

Amoako Boafo’s paintings are held in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; the Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; the Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale‑on‑Hudson, NY; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; the Aishti Foundation, Antelias, Lebanon; the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria, among others.