Name Kofi Kayiga | ||
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Kofi Kayiga (born December 1943), formerly known as Ricardo Wilkins, is a Jamaican-born artist and educator, who migrated to the US, after periods spent in the UK and Uganda. He has exhibited widely internationally and since the 1960s has taught fine art at various institutions, becoming a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt).
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Biography
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, to Jamaican and Cuban parents, he studied at the Jamaica School of Art, and won a government scholarship that enabled him to go to London to pursue a master's degree in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art (1971).
He was a lecturer at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, in the early 1970s, and from 1973 to 1981 he was head of the painting department at the Jamaica School of Art. He was artist-in-residence at the College of Holy Cross, Worcester, MA (1980–83), and went on to become a professor at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.
His work has been characterised as influenced by Africa and by Jamaican folklore and religious themes. In the words of the late art historian Petrine Archer-Straw, "Kayiga’s work is concerned with origins, 'primitive'in the sense of exploring the essence of human consciousness and its links with spirituality. To access this deeper understanding of the self, Kofi strips himself of his formal training and approaches his subject matter intuitively and even mystically, recovering images from deepest memory and the subconscious. His is a pantheistic world that reveals the mystery of the universe in every aspect of daily life. Inanimate objects and situations become animate and alive with animal forms, insects and cosmic creatures that remind us that the spirit world is all around us. Unlike the many artists creating during this era who were inspired by the repatriation message of Garvey and Rastafarianism, Kayiga's world is not one of idealism mediated through the diaspora experience. Instead, he is the only artist who channeled a first-hand experience of Africa into his work, resulting in an immediacy and directness that consists of bold strokes, vibrant colour fields and symbolic language."
In 2015, Kayiga's work features exhibition No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 at the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London.