Adinkra
Adinkra are West African visual symbols encoding philosophical concepts, found in textiles and art, with research on cultural meanings, proverbs, and symbolism.
Adinkra Symbols: What the Akan Signs Mean on City Walls
On a plywood hoarding outside a shuttered bank, someone has painted a bird the size of a door. Its body faces forward, its head turned all the way back, and in its beak is an egg it has lifted from…
Adinkra Symbols in Stone: How Ghana Buries Its Great Men
Drive west out of Accra along the coast road, past Kasoa and the roadside furniture stalls, and at Gomoa Mpota you come to a building that does not look like a tomb.
Adinkra Symbols: What Akan Cloth Says on a City Wall
The first one most people meet is a curl of black lines that looks like a knot tied in the air: two hooks facing away from each other, joined at the base.
Adinkra Symbols in Urban Murals: The Sentence Behind the Sign
The advice comes with so much goodwill that it feels rude to test it. Put the symbol in the work. You paint, or you letter, or you shoot, and somewhere behind you there is Ghana — a parent, a…
Adinkra Symbols in Cloth, on Walls, and on the Kristo Asafo Tomb
At Ntonso, a town north of Kumasi in Ghana's Ashanti Region, a printer works with a stamp cut from a piece of calabash shell.
Who Is Nyame? The Akan Sky God Who Owns the Stories
On the rear window of a trotro in Accra, in gold leaf on a coffin lid in Kumasi, on a pendant at the end of a chain in Brooklyn — the same shape keeps turning up. Two curled arms, one upright stem.