Accra-based artist and master craftsman Paa Joe is the most celebrated figurative coffin maker of his generation in Ghana. The tradition of figurative coffins—orabeduu adekai—first surfaced among the Christian Ga people around the time the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1957.
The late artist, collector, and art dealer Claude Simard (1956–2014) commissioned thirteen architectural models of Ghana’s slave-holding forts from Paa Joe. These still-existing compounds, located on the Gold Coast of West Africa, now Ghana, were used as posts in the European gold trade and as way stations for million Africans sold into slavery and sent to the Americas and the Caribbean islands between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. These sites epitomize the beginning of the African American experience, as President Barack Obama recalled when he toured the Cape Coast Castle with his family in 2009.
Paa Joe’s architectural models were not meant to be coffins per se, although the sites to which they historically refer are the embodiment of death vessels. Before he embarked on creating them, he had visited only a few of these historical sites—among them, Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. He crafted the models after several visits to each site, during which time he took photographs, memorized the compounds’ specificities, and made sketches. This method of producing is directly in keeping with his figurative coffin practice: images can be a basis for inspiration, but the blueprint derived from direct observation of his subjects is the one that becomes imprinted in his mind and controls his moves. Paa Joe experienced and recorded these fortresses in meticulous detail from both a physical and emotional perspective. He reported how difficult it was to walk through the sites and get into the inner rooms: “I went deep. I know everything, every passage. [Underground], the rooms are small. The captives had no space to sleep, to lay down. Everybody was standing.” In contrast, upper sections of the compounds were diametrically spacious, with mansions and well-paved places for arms. For instance, Cape Coast Castle spreads over 3,900 square meters of habitable area, with its irregular polygon shape and a large pentagonal courtyard overlooking the sea. In English hands until the late nineteenth century, the castle was used as the West African headquarters seat of the British governor. In the early 1750s, a primary school was also established there. More recently, the fort served as the regional headquarters of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board and as a museum.
Valérie Rousseau, exhibition brochure for Paa Joe: Gates of No Return (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).
