Artist: Amoako Boafo
Title: Cobalt Blue Earring, 2019
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Location: Miami Beach Convention Center, East Lobby
Miami Beach Legacy Art Purchase (2019)
As announced on November 4, 2019, the City of Miami Beach launched the Legacy Purchase Program, a collaboration with Art Basel Miami Beach, and under the direction of the City’s Art in Public Places (“AiPP”) committee whereby the City would set out to purchase a work of art from contingency funds from the AiPP collection within the Miami Beach Convention Center campus. The goal of the program is to strengthen the connection between the City of Miami Beach, the residents and Art Basel Miami Beach by allowing the residents to be a part of the curatorial process of our public art collection, while broadening our dedication to acquiring meaningful public art and expanding our relationship with Art Basel by enhancing our community engagement in the annual event.
Amoako Boafo is a contemporary painter, born in Accra, Ghana, and based in Vienna, Austria. Boafo’s portrait paintings are enticing in their lucidity, accentuating the figures in each work, who are regularly isolated on single color backgrounds, their gaze the focal point of each work. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the body’s almost soften into abstraction. The most well-known of his series, the Black Diaspora portraits serve as a means of celebration of his identity and blackness.
Boafo emphasizes, “The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach blackness.” Much of his work is inspired by his upbringing, commenting on how males are raised to be aggressive and masculine, which he challenges in his works. Although the artists underlying messages are quite intense, there is a certain softness to the works, the poses are serene and the skin luminous.
Boafo studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2017 was awarded with the jury prize, Walter Koschatzky Art Prize. Widely collected by private and public collectors and institutions, most recently by CCS Bard College Hessel Museum of Art and The Albertina Museum Vienna, and has been named as the first artists in residence at the Rubell Museum.
