Sotheby’s Institute alumna Chantel Akworkor Thompson, founder of DēpART Consultancy and winner of the Institute’s 2025 Gavel start-up pitch competition, shares her insider perspective on what makes Ghana’s art scene one to watch.

The Vibrant Spirit of Ghana

Beyond the global market attention, what makes Ghana truly distinct right now is the rise of women-led creative infrastructures: alternative museums, creative research labs, digital archives, feminist creative economies, and craft-based incubators shaping new futures from the ground up.

These women aren’t just contributing to the ecosystem — they are redesigning it. Their work prioritizes community over spectacle, research over trend cycles, and intergenerational memory over fast-paced cultural consumption. Together, they are expanding what we understand as “art infrastructure” in Ghana: not only galleries and residencies, but healing spaces, knowledge labs, digital commons, and participatory platforms that center women’s agency.

“This moment is not simply a rise in visibility, but a shift in authorship. Women are defining the terms, rewriting the archives, and building new institutional possibilities with global relevance, but first and foremost deeply locally grounded.”

Must-See Spaces ( Physical & Virtual)

While Ghana’s creative ecosystem includes a growing network of galleries and physical hubs, it is equally shaped by virtual and hybrid platforms led by women — digital labs, online archives, and remote research incubators that bridge geographical gaps and expand access to cultural knowledge. Some of the spaces highlighted below operate partially or entirely online, yet their contributions to the ecosystem are no less significant.

Here are the physical women-led institutions and alternative spaces that are reshaping Ghana’s cultural landscape:

  • Citizen Projects — founded by Esi Aida Hayfron-Benjamin — Citizen Projects is a dynamic gallery and exhibition platform in Accra fostering artistic production, research, and critical dialogue.
  • Ɛdan — founded by Esi Aida Hayfron-Benjamin — Citizen Projects is a dynamic gallery and exhibition platform in Accra fostering artistic production, research, and critical dialogue.
  • Limbo Museum — founded by Dominique Petit-Frère — Accra’s newest radical arts institution, Limbo Museum challenges the conventions of the museum as we know it.
  • saman archive— founded by Adjoa Armah — Now entering its second decade, this groundbreaking photographic archive began with salvaged negatives by Ghanaian studio and itinerant photographers.
  • Si Hene— founded by Rita Mawuena Benissan — A vital non-profit preserving chieftaincy and traditional cultural archives across Ghana. Si Hene safeguards centuries of Ghanaian governance, heritage, and ritual practice.

The virtual always births the future physical space. Here are some to follow: 

  • Maame’s Archive— founded by Maame Osaah Asamoah — Part research platform, part visual storytelling studio, Maame’s Archive explores domestic memory, intergenerational gesture, and the spiritual life of photographs.
  • Omoge & Co. Institute— founded by Assumpta Adom Dickens — Omoge & Co. Institute is an interdisciplinary institution advancing gender equity, cultural innovation, and creative sustainability across Africa. Through its Digital Lab and Projects arm, the Institute builds creative and economic agency for women across the arts, culture, and digital economy.

Image: Maame Osaah Asamoah, Ahotɔ (Comfort) 2025

Artists and Trends to Watch 

Asia Clarke specializes in Afro-aesthetic concept hair artistry for film, TV, digital, and print media. But she’s also a multidisciplinary designer whose work explores Afrofuturism, adornment, and ancestral memory in a variety of mediums. 

Denyse Gawu-Mensah is a Ghanaian visual artist whose practice explores memory, family archives, and the textures of time. Winner of the 2024 Gallery 1957 Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize, she opened her inaugural solo exhibition, LIGHTYEARS OF US, in October at the gallery.

Naomi Amevinya is an artist living and working in Accra, Ghana. She holds a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from KNUST. Amevinya explores the female form and its complexities, drawing inspiration from culture, history, memory, and photography to create new identities centered on the female body within African society.

Theresah Ankomah explores the complexities of weaving as a practice that intersects craft, trade, geopolitics, gender, and capitalism.

Samuella Graham (samo.space) is a visual artist whose practice integrates painting, fabric work, installation, storytelling, and community engagement to explore the cultural and psychological dimensions of womanhood.

Across this ecosystem, several trends are emerging, each led or significantly shaped by women.

  1. Archival Futurism
    Women are driving new models for archives rooted in community, spirituality, domestic memory, and digital transformation. Leading voices: Adjoa Armah (saman archive), Denyse Gawu-Mensah (the creative archive), Maame Osaah Asamoah (Maame’s Archive), Rita Mawuena Benissan (Si Hene).
  2. Feminist Institutional Building
    From museums to research centers, women are designing new infrastructures that center equity, care, and long-term sustainability. Leading voices: Assumpta Adom Dickens (Omoge & Co.), Carina Tenewaa Kanbi (Ɛdan), Dominique Petit-Frère (Limbo Museum), Nana Ofori-Atta Ayim (ANO), Rita Mawuena Benissan (Si Hene).
  3. Embodied Practices
    Female artists are using their bodies, femininity, and lived testimony as methodologies. Leading voices: Naomi Amevinya, Samuella Graham, Crystal Yayra Anthony Studio.
  4. Afrofuturist Material Culture
    Hair, adornment, and speculative design are being reimagined as vessels for Black futurity. Leading voices: Asia Clarke / WILD MOON.
  5. Expansive Documentary Photography
    Women photographers are blending film, sound, oral histories, and social research to create new forms of cinematic documentation. Leading voices: Cianeh A. Kpukuyou (Ask), Maame Osaah Asamoah. 

Ghana on the Global Stage 

International collectors, curators, and cultural strategists are now looking beyond conventional galleries and market circuits in Ghana.

What they’re gravitating toward are the very platforms these women are building: research-driven institutions, archives, labs, and community projects that offer depth, context, and futurity.

Residencies, museum partnerships, and long-term collaborations are increasing. Global interest is no longer favoring the extractive; it is increasingly shaped by frameworks that these Ghanaian women themselves are defining, centered in care.

Image courtesy of Limbo Museum

Chantel’s Top Picks in Ghana

Take a look at the top spaces to visit and follow.

Chantel’s Take 

For Chantel, “The women at the center of this feature represent the soul of Ghana’s creative landscape. Their work mirrors the Ghana I believe in — a place where imagination is a political tool, where care is methodology, where archives breathe, and where women build the future in real time.

Their contributions extend far beyond aesthetics. They are reshaping institutional power, reclaiming narratives, and widening the lens through which Ghana is seen locally and globally.

These women — curators, founders, filmmakers, photographers, archivists, designers, and spatial practitioners — are expanding the ecosystem not by mimicking existing structures, but by inventing new ones, grounded in community, research, and cultural memory.”

Banner image courtesy of Saman Archives