The Ghanaian artist Tafa Fiadzigbe – known to the art world simply as Tafa – has come a long way. “I grew up in the slums of Ghana, and the slums in the third world are very different from slums here in America,” he said to the Guardian. “I knew people who ate from garbage dumps. When I was growing up, if someone told me I was going to be in the company of people like Bill Clinton and have them support my art, I’d have thought they were crazy.”
Now showing at Chelsea’s Pictor Gallery in New York until 25 February, Tafa’s art is at once visceral, transcendent and abstract. The pieces at his show include a frenzied protest march against police violence, an ethereal image of a goddess making her ascent and a homage to Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exoticized by 19th-century Europeans for her bodily proportions.
