Posters of the newly deceased are fixtures in public squares throughout the coast of Ghana, their photos bearing headings like “HOME CALL,” “GONE TOO SOON,” “CALL TO GLORY,” and — in the case of accidental death — “PAINFUL EXIT.”
For the Ga, an ethnic group indigenous to fishing villages east of Accra, the capital of Ghana, funerals are raucous community events and death is just a pit stop en route to the afterlife. Getting to that ancestral realm, however, is a perilous journey, ideally undertaken in a souped-up vehicle. That’s where fantasy coffins, or what Ga artists prefer to call design coffins, come in.
Carried through dusty, tightly packed streets in towns like Teshie, a hub of this exuberant art, these pieces are the subject of “The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana,” an exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., through Sept. 5, 2027. A note at the entrance explains that the coffins were made as art objects, not for funerals.
Some 20 artworks by six artists and three workshops are on view, including a gigantic bumblebee and a massive human heart with hot pink ventricles. Often chalked up to whimsy or eccentricity by outsiders, the coffins in Santa Fe are an important part of what the curator Mark Sloan, a photographer and author with decades of experience in Ghana, calls “a celebratory big to-do shindig for your loved one.”
Sloan, the longtime director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, left it to the artists to decide for themselves the subjects, forms and spirit of the pieces. He considers the coffins “a poetic condensation of a life’s path rendered in wood.”
For Ga families, finding a fitting design, whether a book for a teacher or a truck with a squeeze-bulb horn for a mechanic, can be a complex and emotional process. “When they arrive in the shop, they’re really sad — they’re in mourning,” said Eric Adjetey Anang, a third-generation coffin maker who served as the exhibition’s cultural consultant. “You have to take your time and work with any ideas they have, to help the deceased travel to the afterlife.”
Anang grew up sandpapering after school in the workshop of his grandfather Seth Kane Kwei, who died in 1992, and who is credited with pioneering the coffin genre in the late 1950s after crafting a palanquin shaped like a cacao pod for a Ga chief, who was buried in it at his family’s request. When Kane Kwei’s grandmother died shortly afterward, he fashioned a coffin in the shape of an airplane so that her spirit — her “susuma” — could take flight.
Jacob Tetteh-Ashong works alongside his father, Joseph Tetteh-Ashong, known as Paa Joe, a revered coffin maker in Pobiman. Paa Joe spent 12 years apprenticing under Seth Kane Kwei and two years making boats to save enough to open his own workshop.
Daniel Mensah, who goes by the name Hello, apprenticed with Paa Joe before founding Hello’s Design Coffins.
His coffins in Santa Fe include a snazzy white BMW X5, set within a panoramic photograph of the street scene outside his shop, and the plum and pink human heart, spurred by surgeries he had watched on TV medical dramas.
The carving — usually out of wawa, a soft local wood — is an improvisational act done with nary a sketch in advance. Visual references provide inspiration. Sloan was on hand, he said, when “Eric pulled a frozen pompano from the freezer and just started carving,” using the fish as a model for a coffin.
The Ga term for coffins is “abebu adekai,” defined in the exhibition as “coffins that communicate.” Some have a back story: Anang’s bright green sanitation truck, for instance, is a comment on microplastics, clogged gutters and the huge volumes of toxic e-waste shipped from Northern Hemisphere industries. The exhibition also includes “mini-coffins,” such as a “Premium Obama Beer Bottle” by Tetteh-Ashong. In addition to abebuu adekai, the artists fabricate conventional wooden coffins to supplement their incomes.
An 1888 ordinance from the British colonial government precipitated the need for coffins. The traditional Ga practice had been to bury relatives beneath the floor of the family home, to keep the dead close by. But British officials, concerned about hygiene, mandated the use of wooden coffins for burial in designated cemeteries. Some have suggested that fantasy coffins allowed Ghanaians to celebrate their lives and achievements while complying with the law. (Ghana, formerly called the Gold Coast, achieved independence from Britain in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African country to do so.)
Funerals can draw hundreds — and in the case of chiefs, thousands — who parade through the streets alongside dancing pallbearers as music fills the air, punctuated by occasional ceremonial musket fire. The community contributes money for the coffin — they cost about $600 to $800 each — food and drink, and ornaments for the deceased.
The ritual begins privately when the body is brought home from the morgue by the family to be bathed and dressed — all except for shoes. “There is a belief that once you put shoes or slippers on the dead, their soul or spirit will not rest in the afterlife, so they will keep coming home,” Tetteh-Ashong said via WhatsApp from Ghana.
Family members, even if living abroad, are expected to be present. “If they don’t do it, there are consequences, such as their job not flourishing,” Tetteh-Ashong said. Similarly, if a family member didn’t get along with the deceased and wouldn’t give money, “the deceased could meddle in his affairs, because he has more power in the afterlife,” he said.
Families who no longer have deep roots in their hometown will sometimes hire professional mourners, or “funeral criers,” to fill out the crowd and wail, weep, shout and roll on the ground for a fee. The tears cost more for a big funeral.
Fantasy coffins are generally intended for venerable older people. Those who die prematurely from illness or an accident — a “painful exit” — are usually interred more conventionally.
But there are exceptions. Tetteh-Ashong recalled a 29-year-old he knew who was hit by a car and died. The young man was widely regarded as an excellent church singer. After meeting with his family, he decided “that it was OK for us to give him a fitting burial.” Tetteh-Ashong designed a coffin in the shape of a microphone, topped with a small piano “so he could sing in the afterlife,” he said.
The exhibition in Santa Fe looks at the “double life” of fantasy coffins, which, from the 1990s on, have been sought after by galleries, museums and collectors. Artists started appearing at venues like the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Paa Joe spent a month in 2018 building an astonishingly detailed coffin based on a 1910 Ford Model T International. Prices for these projects range from roughly $10,000 to $12,000 — creating income that enables artists to experiment creatively without depending on an actual death.
In Ghana, however, the fantasy coffins’ global profile and high prices have led to some strange and disturbing doings: Grave robbers have snatched jewels and ornaments out of caskets; some have even dug up and resold the coffins.
The problem became so pervasive that just before burial, various parts of fantasy coffins are often deliberately broken — a fin and a tail removed from a fish, for example — to deter thieves.
The coffins themselves have occasionally become an issue: In 2020, a coffin in the shape of a circumcised penis, which was publicized on social media, was rumored to have been made for a sex worker and was widely seen as disrespectful. In fact, it was made to honor a traditional wanzam, similar to a Jewish mohel — someone who performs male circumcisions.
For the artists, the most pressing concern is finding young apprentices, who tend to regard years of honing a craft as unappealing. The Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop, for instance, used to have 10 to 15 apprentices. Now there are just four, three of them Anang’s brothers.
In Santa Fe, Linda Anderle, a part-time resident, showed up at the museum with photographs of a red chile mini-coffin that she and her husband, Bill, had bought from Anang at the International Folk Art Market in 2021.
Her husband was “a red-chile head,” she said, who carried jalapeños in his pocket to add heat to food at restaurants. When he died, Anderle placed his cremated remains in the carved chile, which holds a place of honor in her studio. It underscored an observation by Paa Joe: “Death is not the end. It’s a continuum of life.”
The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana
Through Sept. 5, 2027, at the Museum of International Folk Art, 706 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe: 505-426-1204, moifa.org.
Discussion about this post