After my visit to Bondoukou, I spent a couple weeks in Ghana to pursue research on Leroy E. Mitchell, Jr., an African American artist from Detroit, who spent twenty years (1965–84) living in Ghana where he taught art, first at the Achimota School and then at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Mitchell is a central figure in the narrative being developed for the exhibition, Ghana 57: Art, Independence, Liberation. I found a good deal of information in the archives of the College of Art about his tenure at KNUST and interviewed several individuals who were either students or colleagues of his. The curatorial team working on Ghana 57 is making great progress. A pilot exhibition designed to test some of our themes and interpretive strategies opened at the National Museum of Ghana in September 2024, and an application for a grant to support the installation of the exhibition, scheduled to open in 2027, was submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities in January.
