The Loom
Founder Frances Ademola charts the emergence of Ghanaian art onto the world stage
1969. Man walks on the moon. The Beatles release Abbey Road. Woodstock festival defines the hippie generation. The Boeing 747 jumbo jet takes off. Ghana, on the verge of becoming a teenager, sees Kofi A Busia take over from Kwame Nkrumah as Prime Minister. And, in an old house in the Adabraka neighbourhood of Accra, a little space displaying a few handicrafts began a journey that would see it become the most influential gallery in the country. Behind the desk today, as then, sits Frances Ademola. Now 91, Frances is curating art for the gallery’s upcoming 50th anniversary exhibition and discussing pieces and prices with a stream of Ghana’s best artists. She’s as busy as ever.
“When the Loom started, there were probably five artists you can think of. I don’t take the credit for everything, but I think I was the catalyst,” Frances says. Half a century ago, the idea that we’d see postcolonial Ghanaian art in the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts would have seemed far-fetched. But, as Frances explains, a series of small changes led to the emergence of the country’s arts scene.
“Towards the end of the 1960s there were a few art schools started by artists. You no longer had to go to university to study art. You could be selling oranges and go into places such as the Ghanatta College of Arts and Design and say you wanted to be an artist.
“This brought art out of the cloister and into the marketplace. It was the real magic; suddenly there were a lot of artists who wanted to show their work. It was a quiet revolution.”
No longer did artists need A-levels and money behind them to learn their craft. The Loom emerged as the heart of the scene, a place where artists could sell work off its walls.
It wasn’t Frances’s intention to start a gallery, more a place for handicrafts. When she had to leave the first location – a house said to be haunted – she moved into a dedicated space and employed the renowned Australian architect Kenneth Scott to design it.
“The Loom became a gallery, much to my surprise,” Frances says. “On our first day open, we sold out completely.”
Frances, schooled in Britain, was from the type of family that had HP Sauce on the table and ate cucumber sandwiches for afternoon tea. And in Ghana, unlike in Nigeria, there was barely an arts scene. “But then Nkrumah came along and talked about the African personality; going back to fetch our culture. This resonated with artists. You then had market scenes, fishermen, women with babies... This is represented in the Adinkra symbol of Sankofa, the bird looking behind it – ‘go back and fetch it’.”
Even today, it’s these scenes – bustling markets and darting fish – that dominate galleries in the capital. But as always, art moves. “It’s been a process of going back and fetching it, but now the artists are doing their own thing. We have a whole variety of styles, vibrant paintings. The future is very exciting.”
