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Conrad Egyir — MFA (Painting, 2018)

Detroit-based artist Conrad Egyir was born and raised in Ghana and received his MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2018. Heavily influenced by a rich art form of storytelling in West Africa, his creative practice borrows from a pool of uniquely coded text and the visually based language systems of his roots. The artist explores the relationship between his past experiences in Africa and his present home in the United States, drawn to themes that define the then and now, disparities and similarities, and the image and the self. He analyzes the connections between the semiotics and historicity of these themes which lie within his African postcolonial upbringing and higher education in the West. 

On Grand Boulevard is based off of one of Egyir’s large-scale narrative portrait paintings, where he weaves borrowed superstitions and symbolic aesthetics from West Africa, anachronisms from different cultures, and a redefining of color and identity as defined in Western academics. A crucial aspect of how he explores these themes is through the use of subjects that are out of place in the timelines or settings of the stories he replicates and creates. He seeks to transcend the notions of each subject’s perceived responsibility designated by age, sex, class, and race. ⁠On Grand Boulevard’s depiction of a striking female subject centered within the frame’s minimal backdrop makes for a work that is commanding, colorful, and difficult to resist. 

“The image of one’s self, as an immediate template of portraiture, is often multiplied in my narrative paintings. Concurrently the singular image can become victim and perpetrator, father and son, friend and foe. It is a tool that behooves the viewer to simultaneously step into the shoes of the multiplicitous character, while questioning the relationships within the image and self, be it one’s mental faculties that war against each other or side with each other.” — Conrad Egyir