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Course: Art of Africa > Unit 3
Lesson 3: Ghana- Asafo flags
- Sika dwa kofi (Golden Stool), Asante people
- Linguist Staff (Okyeamepoma) (Asante peoples)
- Adinkra cloth
- Kente cloth (Asante and Ewe peoples)
- Memorial Head (Akan peoples)
- Akua’ba Female Figure (Akan peoples)
- El Anatsui, Untitled
- El Anatsui, Old Man’s Cloth
- El Anatsui, Old Man's Cloth
- Paa Joe's Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker
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Paa Joe's Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker
Paa Joe, Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker, mid-1990s, wood, pigment, metal, fabric, 73.7 x 203.2 x 57.2 cm (Brooklyn Museum)
A conversation with Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Smarthistory.
Want to join the conversation?
- Was anyone ever buried in it?(2 votes)
- Not in that one. That one is in an art museum. It's just the right size and has the right configuration to be used as a coffin.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(catchy jazz music) - [Steven] We're in the Brooklyn Museum and we're looking at a
large wooden sneaker. - [Peri] This is actually a coffin and it's made by Paa Joe, a Ghanaian artist working
in Teshie and Accra on the coast of Ghana. This is actually a tradition that began in the 1950s with Kane Kwei, a Ga artist who began fashioning elaborate coffins for the nouveau rich for
the elites of urban society. - [Steven] Well, that's nothing new. As far as we can look back in history, people have lavished enormous
effort on funerary rites as a way of showing the
deceased's importance. - [Peri] In this case however,
Kane Kwei and his descendants who carried on the tradition
began making coffins that represented something
about the deceased. Usually it was a commodity of some sort that he could associate with them. - [Steven] So, a sneaker. Nike Air. The references are to
modern consumer culture. - [Peri] And we don't know
about this specific one but it could be that the
deceased was an athlete. A great sports fan had
an interest in running. - [Steven] So, somebody
would commission Paa Joe to come and to create a coffin for them. This was in advance of
their death very often. - [Peri] It's possible and
we have a unique phenomenon that develops in urban Accra
and urban Ghana in the 1950s of folks that have excess money to spend who are called the been-tos. That is they have been to Europe or they've been to the United States and they've been to capitalist societies where consumerism is live and well and they've brought back that same want and need for modern things. And that extends into the
way in which they're buried. So, they would very likely
commission something that suggested the status
they held as been-tos. The references to consumerism particularly with designer shoes, designer cars. The very first coffins were less commodity commercialized in this way. For example, we had a woman who was buried in a coffin shaped as a hen and she did have a successful egg business but she was also thought of a
mother hen in her community. - [Steven] What's interesting to me when I look at the sneakers, that it references the way that
Western artists in the 1960s and early seventies appropriated
low commercial culture with an ironic twist
that we know as pop art but this is different. This is a claiming of the status that the object represents
in a very direct way. - [Peri] And in the West, these
are often seen as comical. And I don't think they were intended as such when the owners picked them out. They were really about
going out in grand fashion. Funerals are one of the biggest
events that is a transition from living to the
supernatural realm in Ghana. And people spend lavish amounts of money to bury their relatives. And so, this was just a one-upmanship of what one could do the extravagance to which one could go to
have a elaborate funeral. - [Steven] But maybe the
irony exists in the idea that this particular coffin was not used but was rather collected. It became a work art in the Western sense, despite its original intention. - [Peri] Paa Joe, I think
today gets more commissions from outsiders than he does
from the local community. So we're finding that these
have become collectors items and less and less are put into the ground to decay along with the body
and more and more are put into exhibition spaces
like the Brooklyn Museum. (catchy jazz music)