Changing Lessons: The Kumasi School of “Art and Crafts” in a Scottish Regime (1952-1962)

Abstract

This paper fills a gap in the historiography of Ghana’s modern art curricula. Between 1952 and the turn of the 20th century, the Kumasi College of Art (KNUST), operated two successive curriculum models, the “Art as Teacher Training” model and the “Art as Industrial, Commercial and Professional Enterprise model”. “The Art as Teacher Training” model, the emphasis of this paper, was administered by a team of British and African staff of “Art and Crafts” persuasion. The first decade (1952-1962), led by a Scottish regime of Glasgow Style extraction, upgraded an extant Specialist Art and Crafts Course to a Diploma in Fine Art programme. The study shows how the changing lessons of the Gold Coast and Ghana “School of Art and Crafts” curriculum in Kumasi intersected with the changing fortunes of metropolitan British art institutions such as the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), the Slade, and Royal College of Art (RCA). The paper argues that the persistence of the “Art and Crafts” and “teacher training” ethos in the Scottish regime could have heralded a move towards an emancipated curriculum indifferent to media specialization and antithetical to media-genre-skill elitism. The author notes that the blurred boundaries between “art” and “craft” or “art” and “the everyday” seem prescient for its time, yet, the curriculum’s vocationalist and instrumentalist framework stood in the way of producing independent artists of note.