Kwame Akoto-Bamfo

Kwame Akoto-Bamfo was born in Ghana in 1983, grew up in Accra and the Eastern Region, and graduated from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi. He is an artist, educator and activist. Drawing on the Akan tradition of funerary terracotta heads, which portray and honour the dead, he began the Nkyinkyim project — the name comes from an Adinkra symbol of twisting paths and life's journeys — to commemorate the millions of Africans taken in the transatlantic slave trade and to confront its legacy. The project has grown to thousands of sculpted heads, many modelled on living Ghanaians.

For the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, opened in 2018 by the Equal Justice Initiative to remember the victims of lynching in the United States, he created a sculpture of enslaved men, women and children in chains, at the entrance to the memorial.

How to look at Nkyinkyim: go close to the faces. They are not generic; each head is modelled as a portrait, in the manner of the Akan funerary heads that honour the dead, so the figures read as individuals who were taken, not as a crowd. Then notice the chains and the scale, which make the entrance to a memorial about the United States an object of African history too. That reading is this site's own.

He has also made the Blank Slate Monument, which toured the United States in 2021, from Louisville to the King Center in Atlanta among other stops, and works on restorative justice across the African diaspora. Yale's Beinecke Library has hosted him in its Mondays at Beinecke series.

Where to see the work

The Nkyinkyim figures stand at the entrance of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, run by the Equal Justice Initiative, so visit the memorial for the installation itself and check its opening hours. Other displays are announced by the artist and by the venues that host his touring work. See also adinkra symbols and our lists of Ghanaian sculptors and Ghanaian artists.