Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali, Maya waiting, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 91 x 122cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 1957.

Gallery 1957 proudly presents ‘Fine Feathers Don’t Make Fine Birds,’ a solo show by Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali. This new body of work is curated by Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu and follows a ten-month residency with the gallery in Accra.

Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali fully embodies the ethos of Édouard Manet’s assertion, “We must accept our own times and paint what we see.” In her latest series,“Fine feathers don’t make fine birds,”the series delves into the lives of two marginalized groups of young women in Accra: the Kayayei girls—female porters migrating from northern Ghana—and the Girly Girls, sex workers on Oxford Street. Through these narratives, Ayiboro interrogates themes of power, gender, survival, and agency, employing deconstructed visual elements such as men’s suiting, nudity, and Baroque reinterpretations of African female sexuality. These choices challenge entrenched Ghanaian societal norms, provoking critical questions about class, morality, and representation.

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