Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community surveys the increasingly visible impact Ghanaian artists have had on global art discourse, including the rise of the ‘Ghana School,’ which has emerged over the past five years as an influential group of artists reshaping the contemporary art landscape. Spanning nearly 30 works, the featured artists leverage various mediums and representational strategies, manipulating form, image, and iconography in an invitation for viewers to engage with new perspectives. The exhibition features artists connected to the nation’s capital by birth, heritage or personal history.The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with an essay by DK Nnuro, writer and Curator of Special Projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art.

Quilting a Future finds its roots in the Museum’s Wasserstrom Collection, a vast collection consisting of nearly 400 traditional American quilts ranging from the early nineteenth century to present day. Showcasing the expansive history of quilting, the Wasserstrom Collection provides a springboard for understanding the origins of the medium and the compelling treatment of quilting in contemporary art today. In addition to works by artists known and unknown from CMA’s Wasserstrom Collection, the exhibition features work by Max Adrian, Sanford Biggers, Bisa Butler, Avis Collins Robinson, Carolyn Crump, Vanessa German, Luke Haynes, Carla Hemlock, Letitia Huckaby, Sedrick Huckaby, Heather Jones, Wendy Kendrick, Carolyn L. Mazloomi, Tura Oliveira, Johnathan Payne, America Irby, Mensie Pettway, Priscilla Pettway, Faith Ringgold, Yvonne Wells, Dawn Williams Boyd, and Anthony Peyton Young.

With a PhD from Stanford University in Political Science with a specialization of the Political Economy in East Asia, Greene’s extensive background in the academic and business worlds has informed her art in every detail of her practice. From her portrait sitters to her material, all aspects of Greene’s paintings include researched, intentional details that tie to larger themes of feminism and cultural exchange. “The subjects are women in creative fields, posed to echo historical figurative paintings. Interviews and research into their working lives generate ways for me to render pictorially—through allusions, icons, objects, patterns, and symbols—the rich personhood of my subjects.”

Inspired by the classic novel by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Greene looks into each of her subjects, all greatly accomplished women, and the spaces in which they create. With these subjects, Greene depicts “the figure in a meticulous realist style at the center of the composition within a confined but shifting space to create a metaphorical or symbolic ‘room,’ which serves as an allegory for the precarious terrain of women’s creative autonomy.”

In Room of My Own (Mudang), Greene depicts herself as a traditional Korean shaman. Surrounded by vases of flowers and fruits, with paintbrush and camera in hand, Greene stares back at the viewer with a look of strong focus. Her self-portrait offers a look into Greene’s practice, bringing the viewer into her studio space.

Greene’s work has exhibited internationally, and in 2022 she was a finalist for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Award. Greene received the honor of showing her work with 46 other artists in the traveling show that focused on modern artists’ challenges to traditional definitions of portraiture. In 2022, Greene completed the BAU Summer Artist Residency in Cassis, France.