The 2026 edition of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival, the Ga-language event whose name translates roughly to “friend, let’s go”, now in its second decade as one of West Africa’s most internationally recognized art gatherings, has drawn muralists, performers and multidisciplinary artists into Accra’s streets for a week.
Among the artists showing this year is Samuel Kwasi Akonnor, a Ghanaian painter whose practice sits squarely inside a growing and still under-served category of contemporary African art work made by, and explicitly about, disability.
The artist and the diagnosis
Akonnor was born in Suhum, in Ghana’s Eastern Region, and grew up largely in Accra New Town, where an early interest in drawing developed into formal training. He lives with cervical dystonia, a neurological movement disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions in the neck and produces spontaneous, often forceful shifts in head position. Rather than treating the condition as a subject to be managed around, Akonnor has made it the direct material of his work, with forceful brushwork, symbolic self-portraiture and semi-abstract, collage-influenced compositions that render the physical experience of the disorder as a visual language.
His academic patron and frequent curator, Dr Francis Ankyiah of the University of Education, Winneba’s Department of Art Education, has described the resulting body of work as a “visceral reclamation of voice in spaces of marginalisation.” Ankyiah has also published on Akonnor’s practice in academic settings, including a 2023 paper presented at the Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media and Culture examining the artist’s self-portraiture through the lens of disability survivorship.
An international profile still ahead of the market
Akonnor’s exhibition history has outpaced what is typical for an early-career Ghanaian artist working outside the commercial gallery circuit. His work has been shown at the Global Disability Summit Art Expo in Germany and at affiliated disability-focused exhibitions in Japan and Egypt, with backing from the Robb Foundation and the University of Education, Winneba. In 2025, he won the Best Artist Award at the Peace Inclusion Piece Global Disability Art Festival in Tokyo for the piece Within the Trauma of Disability.
That is a meaningful international footprint for an artist working in the category of disability-centred contemporary art that remains marginal even within Africa’s own contemporary art boom. Ghana’s gallery and auction infrastructure has expanded rapidly over the past decade, built substantially on the international success of artists like Ibrahim Mahama and Serge Attukwei Clottey, both of whom trace part of their early visibility to Chale Wote itself. But that infrastructure has been slower to build pricing, representation and collector relationships around disabled artists specifically, even as institutions like the Global Disability Summit create international exhibition circuits for the work.
“Belongingness” as both title and argument
Akonnor’s current body of work, exhibited under the title Belongingness, makes the market gap explicit as its subject. In his artist statement, he frames the question directly, who is permitted to belong in public, cultural and political space? The work, he says, rejects “the politics of invisibility”, refusing to present disability as tragedy and instead treating it as what he calls “a site of knowledge, resilience, and creative power”. Inclusion, in his framing, is “not charity but justice”, a distinction with direct implications for how galleries, collectors and cultural institutions are asked to engage disabled artists as participants in contemporary discourse rather than as subjects of it.
The business behind the brush
That distinction, between visibility and viability, is also the subject of an upcoming conversation to be hosted by The High Street Journal. The X Space series will bring together artists Sedinam Gbeku and Ernest Lomotey for a discussion titled “Beyond the Brush: Transforming Art into a Thriving Business”, examining how Ghanaian visual artists move from exhibition and critical recognition toward sustainable income, pricing, representation, collector development and the commercial infrastructure that determines whether acclaim converts into a livelihood. Lomotey is an artist and an art educator who has been part of Chale Wote since 2021. His works include repurposing paper to give the material new life. His pieces, built from processed paper, explore sustainability
Gbeku, a Ghana-based contemporary artist and muralist whose work explores emotion and shared Black experience across canvas, digital and mural formats, brings a practitioner’s view of that transition from a career built partly outside traditional gallery representation. The conversation lands squarely on the question Akonnor’s own trajectory raises. Can an artist win international awards and exhibit across three continents and still face a market that has not fully worked out how to represent, price, or collect disability-centred work at the scale its critical reception would suggest?
High Street Talks by The High Street Journal on August 18, 2026, will interrogate what remains the open question for Akonnor and for a wider generation of Ghanaian artists working outside the market’s more established lanes.
