What does it mean to carry home with you?

For Amoako Boafo, the answer is neither metaphor nor nostalgia. In I Bring Home with Me, presented at Roberts Projects, the Ghanaian painter reconstructs his Accra studio at full scale inside a Los Angeles gallery. Portraits do not hang passively on white walls; they inhabit a living architecture—an environment charged with memory, conversation, and communal energy.

Boafo’s exhibition collapses geography. Accra exists inside LA. The studio becomes sculpture. Portraiture becomes spatial experience.

Painting Black Presence with the Hand

Boafo has emerged as one of the defining painters of his generation, known for his luminous portraits of Black subjects rendered through a distinctive technique: he paints skin with his fingertips.

Swirling, gestural marks build faces and arms in thick impasto, producing surfaces that vibrate between abstraction and figuration. The technique recalls 20th-century modernism yet feels insistently contemporary. Pigment gathers and breaks across the canvas like living topography. Each touch carries both force and tenderness.

Rather than confront stereotypical imagery head-on, Boafo constructs a different visual field—one where his subjects, whether friends, family members, public figures, or imagined characters, occupy space with autonomy. They rest, play, recline, meet the viewer’s gaze. Their interiority is not implied; it is palpable.

Pattern intensifies this presence. Floral textiles, graphic backdrops, and paper transfers interrupt flat color with rhythm. Embroidered details punctuate certain works, transforming the canvas into a site of layered materiality. Representation, as Boafo has stated, lies at the core of his practice: documenting, celebrating, and expanding the ways Blackness can be seen.

The Studio as Sculpture

For I Bring Home with Me, Boafo collaborated with Accra-based architect Glenn DeRoche of DeRoche Projects to recreate his studio as a freestanding wooden structure inside the gallery.

The installation is not decorative framing. It is conceptual infrastructure.

Monstera wallpaper greets visitors at the entrance, echoing the botanical motifs that often animate Boafo’s paintings. Porous wall dividers and grid windows fracture boundaries between interior and exterior. Paintings are embedded directly into the architecture—walls become canvases, canvases become walls.

At the center stands a wooden folding-panel sculpture referencing nkyinkyim, an Adinkra symbol meaning “twisting.” The structure functions as both display device and metaphor: resilience is not linear; it bends, adapts, reforms. The twisting panels hold paintings like living membranes, suggesting that identity itself is elastic.

The black timber framework of the studio contrasts with bursts of color—floral seat covers, textured surfaces, patterned wallpaper—mirroring the tension within Boafo’s paintings between solidity and exuberance.

“Elsewhere Within Here”

The exhibition’s title signals a paradox. To bring home with you is to recognize that place is portable. Boafo documents the “images, sounds, people, stories and events” that shape his sense of belonging. By reconstructing his studio, he materializes that emotional geography.

Visitors move freely through the installation, echoing the gatherings that animate the real studio in Accra. Boafo’s workspace is not solitary; it is communal. Conversations, shared meals, music, and debate feed the paintings as much as pigment does. The architectural replica invites viewers into that dynamic, transforming spectators into participants.

Surrounding galleries extend the narrative. Portraits weave Boafo’s family history with broader Ghanaian cultural memory. Figures alternate between repose and movement—lounging on patterned sofas, leaning into contemplative silence, or inhabiting moments of playful tension. Across these canvases, personal and historical timelines interlace.

A Global Trajectory Rooted in Accra

Born in 1984 in Accra, where he continues to live and work, Boafo’s rise has been swift and sustained. Solo exhibitions such as Soul of Black Folks at the Museum of the African Diaspora and presentations at institutions including the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum have cemented his international presence. His works reside in major collections, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Yet this global circulation does not dilute his anchoring in Accra. If anything, it intensifies it. Rebuilding his studio inside a Los Angeles gallery underscores a commitment to origin—not as static heritage, but as living, evolving source.

Architecture as Emotional Frame

The collaboration with DeRoche Projects is more than exhibition design. It reflects a shared philosophy of space as social catalyst. Known for community-driven projects such as The Surf Ghana Collective—recognized at the 2022 Venice Architecture Biennale—DeRoche’s practice emphasizes sustainability and local material knowledge.

Inside Roberts Projects, that ethos translates into an architecture that feels handmade and inhabited. Sustainability is implicit in the choice of materials and in the conceptual reuse of space: the studio migrates without losing its spirit.

The result is an environment where paintings and structure operate symbiotically. The gallery no longer functions as neutral container; it becomes a charged site of exchange.

The Future Imagined Through Presence

Across I Bring Home with Me, Boafo’s figurative language continues to evolve. His brushless, fingertip method remains central, but compositions grow more spatially ambitious. The integration of architecture expands portraiture beyond the canvas, asking how environments shape identity and how identity, in turn, reshapes space.

The exhibition proposes that Black subjectivity is not confined to representation alone; it requires room—literal and symbolic—to unfold. By embedding his paintings within the architecture of his own making, Boafo asserts that the studio, the community, and the cultural memory of Accra are inseparable from the images themselves.

Home, in this context, is neither retreat nor escape. It is a portable foundation—a structure sturdy enough to travel, flexible enough to adapt, and vivid enough to hold the weight of history while imagining what comes next.