Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize 2022

PRISCILLA KENNEDY

PRIZE RECIPIENT

Born in 1994, Priscilla Kennedy lives and works in Kumasi. She is a member of the blaxTARLINES KUMASI collective and is presently pursuing her MFA at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST-Kumasi, Ghana.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the same institution. Notably, she won the esteemed First Merit Award in the Barclays L'atelier Art competition in South Africa and was honoured as the recipient of the 2022 Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize. With a multidisciplinary approach, Kennedy intricately weaves connections between body, race, sexuality, and fictional histories of objects with hybrid life forms.

Her artistic practice encompasses diverse media, such as painting, tapestry, and light. These result in a tentacular deconstruction of the female body, including her own, as a multi-site for engaging conversation. Kennedy was the 2022 recipient of the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize.

ELISABETH EFUA SUTHERLAND

FIRST RUNNER UP

Elisabeth Efua Sutherland comes from a background in theatre and dance, with a career that also encapsulates sculpture, performative objects, cultural production, film and storytelling. Using her body and various elements, she employs a form of myth making to explore the power relationships of our past to our future; our spirit and our material; our elders and our youth; and the idea of custodianship of people, narratives, culture, history, and the future.

Sutherland has been an artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute Paris organised by 89Plus and co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets with Julie Boukobza (2016); at the Villa Empain in Brussels (2017) with curator Asad Raza; and at the Harn Museum of Art(2017). She has performed variously in Accra at the Nubuke Foundation, Terra Alta and the Alliance Francaise d’Accra; at the June Havoc & Working Theatre in New York; at the International Metabody Forum/London; at the Harn Museum of Art; at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech in 2018; at the AlHamriyah Studios of the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2022, and at LaFriche Belle de Mai in Marseille 2022. Her current projects include.The Mud People (2022) - a contemporary circus work; A Spider! A Spider! A Spider! (2022) - an immersive performance piece; and Asetena, or The Art of Sitting Down (2022) - an installation using Ashanti traditional architecture and domestic stools.

NAOMI AMEVINYA

SECOND RUNNER UP

Naomi Amevinya lives and works in Accra and Mampong Akwapem. She has a background in Painting and holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Department of Painting and Sculpture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana in 2014. 

Her paintings are inspired by plants and the body presented in an abstract way. She found herself in a space that has led to an endless process of discovery, also learning about space, and society.

She is interested in the feminine characteristics of plants in terms of procreation as givers of life, beauty in terms of colour, textures, shape and the forms of nature as a reflection of how a woman’s body is, the spiritual connections of plants in terms of parents using these plants and its inherent power to protect us against unforeseen circumstances, drive out various evil spirits, as a form of healing. Shelter because we believe spirits dwell within us in our environment, and plants as well.

Her exploration of these manifests mainly through gestural drawings, figures and plants in their abstract form, and using several layers of paints on canvas, also taking inspiration from the environment, distorted past memories, photographs and her daily experience.

She is also interested in the idea of spiritual existence, focused on how these two creates a sense of harmony as both coexist within the same space, are intertwined. She believes as a society, coordination and effort in protecting and promoting connections between human existence, experience and the environment is an essential part of our coexistence. Therefore, She wants ‘Reflections Of The Self’ paintings to reflect the myriad connections between humans and nature. She is also exploring and experimenting with the idea of colour, texture and natural forms.