Celestial City

Superhouse is pleased to announce the presentation of a collection of new sculptures by the internationally acclaimed Ghanaian artist, Paa Joe, in Celestial City. The exhibition takes place from March 13 to April 27, 2024, marking the inauguration of the gallery's new location at 120 Walker Street, New York, NY. 

Throughout a career spanning six decades, Paa Joe has explored Ghanaian beliefs on life and death. His carved wooden coffins, known as abeduu adeka, or proverb boxes, take the form of an object intended to glorify the deceased. Over the past 15 years, Paa Joe has transformed the folk craft tradition into Pop art, creating idiosyncratic renditions of quotidian objects for the global art market.

For his debut solo show in New York, the artist chose to pay homage to the city itself, creating a portrait of the Big Apple through objects emblematic of the five boroughs. The exhibition includes two human-scale coffins, one in the shape of a Heinz ketchup bottle, a familiar sight at any corner diner, and a yellow taxi cab, once a symbol of the city, now fleeting in the wake of rideshare services. 

On view in Celestial City, viewers will also encounter scaled-down works, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the urban landscape. Replicas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and a Hermès Birkin handbag represent the prominent art and fashion industries. In recognition of New York's history of welcoming migrants, the exhibition features disproportionate versions of a bagel with a schmear, a Statue of Liberty, and a hotdog. Finally, acknowledging the less savory aspects of the city, there is a trash can overflowing with refuse and a depiction of a subway rat.

Paa Joe is a member of the Ga community, residing in several villages around Ghana’s capital city, Accra. For the Ga people, funerary rights are an important process allowing the dead to transition to the afterlife while enabling the living to honor the deceased’s life and vocation. In the early 1950s, Paa Joe’s uncle, Kane Kwei pioneered the first figurative coffin – a cocoa pod intended for a chief as a ceremonial palanquin. When the chief passed away during its construction, it was repurposed as his coffin. This innovative art form quickly gained popularity, and Kane Kwei began creating bespoke commissions resembling living and inanimate objects, symbolizing the deceased individual's identity (an onion for a farmer, an eagle for a community leader, a sardine for a fisherman, etc.). Paa Joe apprenticed with his uncle from 1960 until 1972, at which point he established his own studio, Paa Joe Coffin Works.

About Paa Joe

Born Joseph Tetteh-Ashong, Paa Joe is a second-generation fantasy coffin maker, contributing to an artistic tradition of great importance around Ghana’s capital, Accra. Known as abeduu adeka, or proverb boxes, these end-of-life vessels illustrate Ghanaian beliefs concerning life and death. Since the 1960s, the artist has meticulously carved and painted figurative coffins, representing various living and inanimate objects symbolizing the deceased (an onion for a farmer, an eagle for a community leader, a sardine for a fisherman, etc.). Following global acclaim from the renowned exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) in 1989, Paa Joe’s practice has evolved, incorporating smaller-scale sculptural boxes and introducing new symbols reflecting contemporary times, such as mobile phone– and Air Jordan-shaped coffins. His body of work has been the subject of two books, Going into Darkness (1994) and The Buried Treasures of the Ga (2008), as well as the documentary Paa Joe & The Lion (2016). Paa Joe’s coffins have been featured in solo exhibitions at Gallery 1957 (Accra, Ghana) and The High Museum of Art (Atlanta, USA), as well as in group presentations at The Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago, USA), Fondation Cartier (Paris, France), Jack Shainman (New York, USA), Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, Switzerland), NBB Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, USA), Superhouse (New York, USA), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK). His work is included in the permanent collections of The British Museum (London, England), The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, USA), The National Museum of Funeral History (Houston, USA), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, USA). Paa Joe lives and works in Kpobiman, Greater Accra, Ghana.