Hand Painted Movie Posters From Ghana

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.- The MoCa is featuring the exhibition ?Outrageous Supercharge: Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana? in the galleries Building 11 Hallway. The exhibition is ongoing

Hand painted on flour sacks, these promotional film posters display a broad range of aesthetic innovation and a curious take on American culture. Spanning film genres from action to horror to romantic comedies, the movie posters popularly adorned the barber shops and movie theaters of Ghana.

According to horror fiction writer Clive Barker, "I have one of these posters hanging on the wall just outside the office where I am writing these words. It?s a Hellraiser poster, and it features the antihero of that series, Pinhead, looming over a cityscape. He has two large fangs, and from his mouth hangs a tiny human figure, clearly about to be swallowed. There is no such scene in the movie. The image is a grimly playful fantasia, entirely of the artist?s creation. The fact that it?s painted on tattered canvas, the paint cracked and fading, only serves to increase the potency of the image."

The MASS MoCA is an open platform ? a welcoming place that encourages dynamic interchange between making and presenting art, between the visual and performing arts, and between our extraordinary historic factory campus and the patrons, workers and tenants who again inhabit it.

MASS MoCA works hard to make the whole cloth of art-making, presentation and participation a seamless continuum. Performing arts residencies offer well-equipped and professionally staffed technical facilities and stages, and a sophisticated, diverse and sympathetic audience for new work ? especially technically complex work that requires generous allocations of time and space impossible in conventional theatrical settings.

Likewise, MASS MoCA?s vast galleries and expert fabrication staff give visual artists the tools and time to create works of scale and duration impossible to realize in the time and space-cramped conditions of most museums. We endeavor to expose our audiences to all stages of art production; rehearsals, sculptural fabrication, and developmental workshops are frequently on view to the public, as are finished works of art.