❷ Nubuke Extended
❸ Programming Calendar
❹ Record
❺ Preserve
❻ Promote
❼ Woori
❽ 20-Year Timeline
❾ Acknowledgements
❿ Visual Archive
⓫ Publications and Press
⓬ Donate / Support
Record. Preserve. Promote.
Nubuke @ 20
Nubuke @ 20
Founded in 2006, Nubuke Foundation has grown from a cultural vision into one of Ghana’s important spaces for contemporary art and cultural engagement. Its mission — to record, preserve, and promote the arts and culture of Ghana — has taken shape through exhibitions, art talks, film screenings, readings, poetry, performances, seminars, festivals, workshops, residencies, research, and long-term community-based work.
This anniversary website is an archive of that journey.
It brings together twenty years of images, stories, exhibitions, programmes, partnerships, press, public moments, and institutional memory. It is not a complete record of everything Nubuke has done, because no archive can fully hold the life of a place that has meant many things to many people. But it is a beginning: a way to gather the fragments, revisit the milestones, honour the people, and make visible the many hands, ideas, and communities that have shaped Nubuke Foundation over the years.
Nubuke @ 20 is both a celebration and a pause for reflection. It looks back at what has been built, while also asking what it means to keep building. It honours the artists, cultural workers, children, schools, families, partners, communities, staff, board members, volunteers, visitors, and friends who have passed through Nubuke’s spaces and helped give them life.
After twenty years, Nubuke remains committed to the same essential work: creating spaces where art can be encountered, cultural knowledge can be shared, communities can gather, and new possibilities can take form.
A Place Where Art, Learning, and Community Meet
Nubuke Foundation has always been more than a gallery. From its base in East Legon, Accra, Nubuke has functioned as a meeting place: for artists and audiences, for children and educators, for poets and performers, for researchers and cultural practitioners, for local communities and international collaborators. It is a space where exhibitions are not isolated from conversation, where learning is not separate from making, and where art is understood as part of a wider cultural life.
Its location has shaped this role. Nubuke sits within a unique social and cultural crossroads: close to the University of Ghana, within East Legon, and in relation to the indigenous community of La Bawaleshie. Over the years, this has allowed the Foundation to bring together people who might otherwise not share the same space — students, families, artists, academics, neighbours, patrons, schoolchildren, cultural workers, and visitors from Ghana and beyond.
This gathering function is central to Nubuke’s identity. People come for exhibitions, but they also come for talks, performances, workshops, screenings, festivals, poetry, readings, school visits, and informal encounters. They come to sit in the garden, to meet artists, to bring children, to ask questions, to see what is being made, to remember what has been made, and to imagine what else might be possible.
In this sense, Nubuke’s work has always been about access. Not only access to artworks, but access to ideas, to creative processes, to cultural memory, to professional development, to community, and to the confidence that art belongs within everyday life.
From a Cultural Space to a Living Institution
Since 2007, Nubuke Foundation has consistently programmed a rotating calendar of exhibitions, averaging several exhibitions each year and presenting the work of artists across painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, installation, textile, fibre, and other contemporary practices.
These exhibitions have supported mid-career and experienced Ghanaian artists, while also creating opportunities for young and emerging artists. They have also opened Nubuke to artistic voices from West Africa and beyond, including artists from Togo, Nigeria, Benin, and other international contexts.
Over the years, Nubuke has presented and supported the work of artists including James Barnor, Na Chainkua Reindorf, Isaac Nana Opoku (AFROSCOPE), Afi Kodjobi, Odun Orimolade, Gideon Appah, and many others. Each exhibition has added to a wider record of contemporary artistic practice in Ghana: what artists were thinking about, what materials they were working with, what questions they were asking, and how their work entered into conversation with audiences.
For Nubuke, an exhibition is not only a finished presentation. It is also a space of encounter. It creates a moment where artists, viewers, students, critics, curators, families, and communities can gather around form, image, object, memory, and meaning. It becomes part of an ongoing archive — not only of artworks, but of relationships, questions, debates, gestures, and histories.
Twenty years later, this archive continues to grow.
The Accra Home
In 2019, Nubuke Foundation opened its commissioned, purpose-built gallery in Accra. With over 500sqm of indoor and outdoor exhibition space, the building expanded the Foundation’s capacity to present ambitious exhibitions and public programmes.Set within a lush, green environment, the Accra space allows for exhibitions above, within, and beneath the gallery structure. This architectural openness has helped Nubuke maintain the character of a place where art is both carefully presented and deeply connected to its surroundings.
The Accra gallery has become a visible expression of Nubuke’s commitment to supporting artistic practice in Ghana. It gives artists room to test ideas, scale up projects, host audiences, and participate in a wider cultural conversation. It also gives the public a space where contemporary art can be experienced freely, with curiosity and without intimidation.
This openness matters. Nubuke Foundation is open and free to the public five days a week. That accessibility is part of its institutional ethics. The work of preserving and promoting culture is not complete if people cannot enter, gather, look, learn, return, and feel that the space belongs to them too.
The Work in Wa and Loho
Nubuke’s story is also a story of movement beyond Accra.
Since 2010, Nubuke Foundation has worked with textile weaving communities in Ghana’s Upper West Region. This work began through artist-led community initiatives and extended to vocational schools training Blind and Deaf children in weaving strip fabrics and furniture. These relationships became part of a broader commitment to cultural preservation, design intervention, skill development, and inclusive creative practice.
In 2016, the Nubuke Foundation Centre for Textiles and Clay opened to the public in Loho, on the outskirts of Wa. Set on a ten-acre site, the Centre provides a platform for artists, weavers, potters, researchers, students, and communities to engage in exhibitions, workshops, residencies, research, creative arts programming, and knowledge exchange.
The Centre’s work supports the documentation and preservation of handmade textiles and pottery. But it is not only concerned with preservation in a static sense. It is also concerned with transformation — with how inherited knowledge can meet contemporary life, how traditional skills can be adapted into new forms, how communities can benefit from cultural production, and how creative practice can connect people across Ghana, Africa, and the world.
Through this work, Nubuke has helped draw attention to the creative dynamism taking place far from Ghana’s major cities. The Centre for Textiles and Clay makes visible the labour, knowledge, and imagination of communities in Wa, Loho, Nadowli, Nandom, and the wider Upper West Region. It insists that the story of contemporary Ghanaian art and culture cannot be told from Accra alone.
Weaving as Knowledge
The work in the Upper West Region has also deepened Nubuke’s engagement with textiles, fibre, clay, and the cultural knowledge held in material practice.
Weaving is not only a technique. It is a language, a livelihood, a form of memory, a structure of relation, and a way of carrying knowledge across generations. Pottery, clay, fibre, dyeing, spinning, and strip weaving each hold histories of place, labour, community, adaptation, and survival.
At the Centre for Textiles and Clay, these practices are engaged through workshops, design interventions, exhibitions, residencies, and collaborations. Artists and researchers are invited to learn from communities, while also bringing new questions and approaches into the space. The result is not a one-way exchange, but a living process of encounter.
This is one of Nubuke’s important contributions: creating platforms where indigenous knowledge, contemporary art, research, design, and community practice can meet without reducing one into the other. The work does not treat traditional practice as something behind us. It treats it as something still thinking, still teaching, still making, still capable of shaping the future.
Woori Festival
In 2021, Nubuke Foundation established the annual Woori Festival to celebrate the cultural wealth of the Upper West Region.
“Woori” is a Waali expression meaning “to weave.” The festival follows the tradition of Ghanaian festivals as sites of commemoration, celebration, community strengthening, and development. What began as a three-day festival has grown into a week-long programme focused on intergenerational indigenous knowledge and practices in weaving and pottery.
Woori brings together cultural producers, researchers, curators, artists, artisans, students, and members of the community. Through weaving demonstrations, participatory workshops, performances, music, masterclasses, moderated dialogues, talks, exhibitions, and public gatherings, the festival immerses audiences in the sounds, sights, tastes, and textures of the Upper West Region.
The festival is also a learning space, a networking platform, and a marketplace for cultural production. It supports textile and fibre-based practice, creates visibility for artists in Ghana and abroad, and builds on the relationships Nubuke has developed with communities over many years.
Importantly, Woori also creates room for young creatives working across fashion, music, film, literature, poetry, and other forms. It gives them a platform to present their work, build networks, connect with patrons, and see themselves as part of a larger cultural ecosystem.
Woori is a festival, but it is also an argument: that cultural knowledge is alive; that craft is intellectual; that weaving is contemporary; that community is a site of artistic production; and that Ghana’s cultural future must be built with attention to the many places where knowledge is already being held.
Children, Schools, and Public Engagement
Children and young people have always been central to Nubuke’s work.
Through reading clinics, art workshops, drama, poetry productions, environmental learning, fabric design sessions, and artist-led activities, Nubuke has created opportunities for children to encounter art early and directly. These programmes allow young people to meet artists, poets, and other creatives, and to experience culture not as something distant, but as something they can participate in.
Schools are an important part of this public engagement. Exhibition programmes are often shaped to welcome younger audiences, with artists invited to engage directly with students and help them understand exhibition concepts through conversation and hands-on learning.
This work begins with families too. Young adults accompany younger siblings. Parents bring children into creative environments. Students return with questions. Children make, read, perform, and participate. In small but lasting ways, Nubuke becomes part of how people first encounter art, storytelling, performance, and cultural production.
In Wa, vocational students from the School of the Blind and the School of the Deaf have benefited extensively from Nubuke’s work in the Upper West Region. Workshops and mentoring opportunities have supported their creative development, and their works have been presented with Nubuke Foundation internationally, including at 1:54 in London, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, and the Textile Triennale in Poland.
These moments matter because they show that access is not symbolic. It must be practised. It must be built into programming, relationships, mentorship, and opportunity. Nubuke’s community work continues to insist that art and culture are strongest when they are shared widely and made available to many kinds of people.
Poetry, Theatre, and the Wider Cultural Field
Nubuke Foundation’s contribution to Ghana’s cultural life extends beyond visual art.
For many years, Nubuke has been a home for poetry, spoken word, theatre, music, film, readings, and performance. These forms have helped expand the Foundation’s identity as a multidisciplinary cultural space where different creative practices can meet and inform one another.
The Ehalakasa movement grew from peer review gatherings of poets in Nubuke Foundation’s garden into a monthly programme of poetry recitals, spoken word, and music. This history is part of Nubuke’s broader role in supporting the growth of appreciation for poetry in Ghana over the last two decades.
Nubuke also supported the growth of Accra Theatre Workshop through mentorship and nurturing. Under the leadership of Elisabeth Efua Sutherland, Accra Theatre Workshop has grown into an internationally recognised contemporary dance and theatre production company.
These histories show Nubuke as a cultural ground from which many things have grown. Some of them remain closely tied to the Foundation; others have moved outward into the world. But they all speak to the importance of making space: for rehearsal, for experimentation, for gathering, for conversation, for risk, and for the slow work through which creative communities find form.
Supporting Artists, Building Careers
Artist development remains one of Nubuke Foundation’s most important commitments.
The Young Ghanaian Artist programme was developed to support new and emerging contemporary artists based in Ghana. Now in its thirteenth year, the programme began as a loosely developed initiative to encourage young people to consider art as a viable career path. It has since grown into a career development platform offering mentorship, workshops, discussions, critique clinics, and guidance from professionals who help artists navigate the art world.
Artists associated with the programme include Lois Arde-Acquah, Theresah Ankomah, Cecilia Lamptey Botchway, Simon Bowman Jr., Na Chainkua Reindorf, and Isaac Nana Opoku. Na Chainkua Reindorf and Isaac Nana Opoku were also featured in Ghana’s second presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
The significance of the Young Ghanaian Artist programme is not only in the exhibitions it produces. It is in the confidence, structure, feedback, and professional support it offers to artists at important moments in their development. It recognises that talent needs care, critique, opportunity, and time.
Nubuke’s Artist-in-Residence programme at the Centre for Textiles and Clay extends this commitment into the Upper West Region. Launched in 2021 with support from the African, Caribbean, Pacific-European Union Culture Structuring Fund, the residency offers artists, writers, designers, curators, scholars, and other creative practitioners time and space to retreat, reflect, explore, and experiment.
Since 2022, artists, illustrators, sculptors, fashion designers, and researchers from Ghana, Uganda, Italy, and the United States have participated in residencies or research trips. Residents are encouraged to engage with weaving communities and students with disabilities, ensuring that their work remains connected to local context, community knowledge, and lived experience.
Through these programmes, Nubuke continues to support artists not only as exhibitors, but as thinkers, researchers, makers, collaborators, and cultural workers.
Partnerships and Shared Research
Nubuke Foundation’s work has also been shaped by partnerships across Ghana and internationally.
A key partner in its community collaborations is the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, with whom Nubuke has an agreement of institutional exchange, practitioner engagement, and practice-based research. Nubuke also has an MOU with the University of Ghana to strengthen the talents of creatives within the university community and its environs.
Internationally, Nubuke Foundation is a member of the Arts Collaboratory network, a learning and sharing platform with like-minded visual arts organisations across the Global South, including South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Nubuke is also participating in CDCD — Contested Desires and Constructive Dialogues — a programme that interrogates colonial legacies of collections, architecture, neo-colonial structures of governance, and women’s stories and voices.
These partnerships expand Nubuke’s work beyond the presentation of art. They connect the Foundation to research, dialogue, exchange, and difficult questions about history, power, memory, heritage, and cultural futures. They also reflect Nubuke’s belief that cultural institutions must remain open to collaboration, learning, and self-questioning.
An Archive of What Has Been Built
Nubuke @ 20 gathers twenty years of work into one place.
It brings together exhibitions, timelines, images, publications, press, programmes, partnerships, acknowledgements, and memories. It is an archive of institutional history, but also an archive of people: artists, founders, directors, staff, board members, volunteers, curators, researchers, teachers, children, schools, weavers, potters, performers, writers, poets, funders, neighbours, audiences, and communities.
To record is to make memory visible.
To preserve is to keep knowledge alive.
To promote is to create the conditions for new expression to emerge.
These three commitments have guided Nubuke Foundation from its beginning. They continue to shape its work in Accra, Wa, Loho, the Upper West Region, Ghana, Africa, and beyond.
This website is part of that commitment. It is a place to look back, but not only to look back. It is a space to understand what has been carried, what has been shared, what has been made possible, and what still needs to be imagined.
The Next Twenty Years
Twenty years is a significant milestone, but it is not a conclusion.
Nubuke Foundation continues to grow through exhibitions, residencies, festivals, workshops, research, partnerships, publications, online productions, community programmes, and new forms of public engagement. Its future depends on the same things that have sustained it so far: artists willing to take risks, communities willing to share knowledge, partners willing to collaborate, audiences willing to return, and supporters willing to believe in the long work of culture.
The next twenty years will require care, imagination, and continuity. They will require stronger archives, deeper research, expanded publications, more support for artists, more sustained programming in the Upper West Region, and continued investment in platforms such as Woori, the Young Ghanaian Artist programme, and the Artist-in-Residence programme.
Nubuke @ 20 celebrates what has been built, but it also opens a door.
It invites you to enter the archive, follow the timeline, revisit the exhibitions, discover the programmes, honour the communities, and support the work still ahead.
Welcome to Nubuke @ 20.
❷ Completed in 2019, Nubuke Foundation’s new gallery building marked an important milestone in the institution’s growth. Designed to expand exhibition possibilities and welcome wider audiences, the space reflects Nubuke’s continued commitment to contemporary art in Ghana.
Learn more about the building and its story →
❿ Twenty years of art, encounters, and shared memories come together in Nubuke’s Visual Archive. Explore photographs of exhibitions, performances, workshops, and the people who have shaped the Foundation’s story.
Explore the Visual Archive →
See the programme calendar here →
❼ Woori means “to weave” in Waali. Since 2021, the festival has brought weavers, artists and communities together in Loho, near Wa, to share knowledge and celebrate a living tradition. Discover how weaving connects generations, creative practices and everyday life.
Explore the story of Woori →
