Samuel Kumi stands beside one of his sculptures at the Harlem Fine Arts Show on Feb. 20. (Credit: Anna Lee)
On a small cocoa farm tucked into Essam, a town in the Western North region of Ghana, 7-year-old Samuel Kumi stumbled upon a large clay deposit abutting the stream behind his house. He molded the clay into dozens of face sculptures, busts and statues, with such a human likeness that his family grew concerned. “They didn’t know how I got that talent,” Kumi recounted. “They thought I was possessed.”
Kumi, now 42, hasn’t stopped sculpting since then. From Ghanaian folktale characters to hyper-realistic busts of Barack Obama, his creations enliven the narratives, lives and mythos from the African diaspora. In his latest endeavor in the U.S. arts market, Kumi travelled to New York for the 18th annual Harlem Fine Arts Show in February. Along with 100 other painters, sculptors and multimedia artists, he presented his pieces and shared the tales behind them.
“My artworks are basically a story of my life experience,” Kumi said to a group of visitors to his stall, gesturing toward a row of chiseled busts. “It ranges from stories that I was told by my grandparents, [where] I wanted to put myself as a character in the story, to my childhood experience.”
“I sculpt to help people feel,” he said.
Sculpting the Past to Envision the Future
From the first sculptures Kumi produced in the 1990s to the artwork he puts forth now, Kumi creates to preserve characters from fictional and real stories. The sculptor relished in the folktales that his grandparents told him during his childhood. Many of those stories had faded into obscurity. To preserve them, Kumi sculpted his favorite characters into 3-D, tactile interpretations. For people to make a “great projection into the future,” Kumi said, there must be some evidence of important characters, whether they be real, fictional or allegorical — that have helped shape the world today.
One of his recurring muses is Ayeyya, a folkloric woman who assessed her suitors based on their musical abilities. In his series called “Ayeyya and the Untold Melody,” Kumi recasts the eponymous woman in various iterations of his imagination. One of his prized busts depicts Ayeyya with her head cocked upward and hand postured around her chin in a judicial manner. Her pupils carved into heart-shaped silhouettes.
Placing himself in the series, he also sculpted himself as a child.
“I remember at that age, I was obsessed with her, the story, and the character,” Kumi said. Out of bronze and resin, he created a statue of himself as an adolescent, whistling into a flute and trying his luck at winning Ayeyya’s admiration.
Kumi also creates hyper-realistic sculptures of notable people in Ghanaian and American history. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kumi chiseled a bust in his likeness. Beneath Floyd’s face, Kumi sculpted a collar where smaller reliefs of people with raised, clenched fists, paid homage to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Kumi began one of his ongoing pieces, “Tales of Truncated Lives,” to help families commemorate their loved ones. In a laborious tapestry that will be composed of 5,000 sculpted busts, “Tales” memorializes people who prematurely lost their lives — whether that be due to COVID-19, police brutality or other tragedy. At the Harlem Fine Arts Show, passerby leaned into the tapestry sample that Kumi showcased. “I give the family members another copy of the sculpture,” the artist explained, holding two identical busts. His intention with “Tales,” he said, is to explore how commemoration can be expressed as both a deeply personal and collective experience.
The Artist’s Journey from Ghana to the U.S.
Before coming to the U.S. about four years ago, Kumi established a notable career in Ghana, straddling teaching gigs and a to-do list of commissions.
He was the creative director for the Nkyinkyim Museum, the country’s largest outdoor exhibition space. There, set within farmland east of the capital city of Accra, he oversaw the installation of sculptures and artifacts.
Departing from his family’s tradition of cocoa farming, Kumi pursued an arts education at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, a city about 150 miles inland from Accra on the Atlantic coast. As a star pupil and teaching assistant, he threw himself into creating sculptures with precise anatomical likeness.
Sourcing inspiration from both African and Western artworks, Kumi does not adhere to any singular sculptural tradition. The inception of his current series, “Juxtaposing the Superimposed,” which includes “Tales,” emerged from the cultural clashes he noticed between Ghana and the U.S. Many of his full-body sculptures are composed with African and Western techniques. For instance, Kumi’s “Ballerina Mursi” sculpture features a woman wearing the lip plate of the Mursi ethnic group in Ethiopia. Her posture, however, takes after the Western ballet tradition, as she stands on pointe with her arms thrust over her head.
Kumi’s merging of African and American art forms became especially pronounced after the sculptor arrived in the U.S. When asked what drew him to America, Kumi answered: “a woman on Facebook.”
In 2022, Sophie Eldridge, a retired nurse, became enraptured with Kumi’s sculptures on social media. After contacting the artist through Facebook’s messaging platform, Eldridge invited him to stay with her family for a year in Jackson, Tennessee, about midway between Memphis and Nashville. She encouraged her new friend to expand his reach to U.S.-based artists and curators.
In a telephone interview, Eldridge laughed while explaining Kumi’s dedication to his craft. After Kumi had devoted hours to sculpting a bust of Obama, she said she told him, “Okay, you can stop now! It already looks like him!”
After a stilted entry into Jackson’s art market, Kumi moved to Loveland, Colorado — a hub for the arts at the foot of the Rocky Mountains north of Denver. Since 2023, he has worked out of the Art Castings of Colorado foundry to produce bronze and resin sculptures. He found himself surprisingly unperturbed by Colorado’s cold winters, though his decision to come to the U.S. still had its drawbacks. Except for an occasional video call with his three young children, who live in Ghana, he spends most of his time fixated on his work.
Technology Plays a Role
While considering an appropriate theme for this year’s Harlem Fine Arts Show, Dion Clarke, the exhibition’s founder and CEO, said he wanted to capture two sentiments: the rich history of Black art and the exciting future awaiting it. With the curators for the show, he decided to title this year’s presentation, “Art for Technology: Art for Healing. History as Power. Legacy in Motion.”
Technology — especially social media — has become an essential factor in the show’s success. Using Instagram, Facebook and interviews with media outlets, Clarke markets the event to thousands of fine art enthusiasts and creatives. It was through social media that he connected with Kumi last year. Upon learning about the Harlem Fine Arts Show online, Kumi tracked down Clarke and called him.
As soon as Clarke saw the sculptor’s work, he invited Kumi to be one of the first confirmed artists for the February showcase. After 18 years of finding talented artists, Clarke sensed that Kumi’s works would resonate with New York City’s fine arts community.
“Black art is not just black art — it’s translational,” Clarke said. “It might be African in methodology but there’s a bigger application to all art.” In Kumi’s sculptures, Clarke said he found echoes of the sculptures produced by Woodrow Nash, a renowned artist and former show participant from Ohio, whose Afro-European pieces magnetized audiences for their human likeness. “Kumi has the same effect,” Clarke said. “He brings images to life.”
Technology also provides Kumi with a semblance of his home and friends in Ghana. Weaving between hordes of people at the Harlem Fine Arts Festival, two of Kumi’s closest friends in the U.S. — Aubrey Lamptey and Phree McCullough — helped the sculptor welcome and usher attendees through his stall. Both met Kumi online.
Lamptey, a retired physician from Hartville, Tenn. and native of Ghana, learned of Kumi through his long-time friend Eldridge. While standing guard just outside of the artist’s booth, Lamptey said he was not fond of sculpture but was drawn to the artist’s work after researching it online. When the two Ghanaians finally met, they bonded over shared experiences.
“Today, I’m his biggest champion,” Lamptey said. “What he does is unique — everybody has a different style, but his is so lifelike, with such an attention to detail.”
McCullough, too, found Kumi through the internet. As a fellow artist looking to hone her techniques, she found Kumi’s works on Facebook and asked him to be her mentor. “He’s more than an artist, he’s a compassionate teacher, too,” she said. Their relationship strengthened as they traded insights and techniques.
“She’s basically become my sister,” Kumi said.
Stationed behind Kumi’s stall at the Harlem exhibition, McCullough explained Ayeyya and each of his works with as much acuity as the sculptor himself.
As Kumi makes headway in the U.S. arts market, he continues to sculpt his own story — whether that be in bronze, resin or in new connections across the country. Through the Harlem Fine Arts Show, Clarke hopes that the sculptor and his forms of storytelling will inspire artists after him.
“Kumi’s passing these stories down from generation to generation,” Clarke said. “That’s generational wealth.”
About the author(s)
Anna Lee is a general assignments reporter based in New York and Boston. They are currently reporting on environmental legislation and criminal justice reform.