Dorothy Akpene Amenuke

Born in 1968 in Ghana, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke lives and works in Kumasi, where she has been teaching at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) since 2009. She was the first female professor at the Department of Painting and Sculpture. Driven by a commitment to the community centered on care, sharing, and transmission, she involves family members, students, and peers in the conception and creation of her artworks. This collaborative approach has influenced her students’ practice, including Ibrahim Mahama, who studied under her in 2013-2014.

Since the 1990s, Dorothy A. Amenuke’s work can be said to represent a break from the academic heritage she received and to offer a renewal of the structural vocabulary. Drawing inspiration from the materials of her everyday environment— patchwork blankets, pandanus mats, plastic bags— she sees textiles as a sculptural material in their own right, which she shapes like clay or wood. She also experiments with scale so that her textile installations unfold in space, investing and transforming architecture and the natural landscape alike.