In 1960, when Joseph Tetteh-Ashong was 15, he began an apprenticeship in coffin-making with his mother’s cousin, Seth Kane Kwei. The training led Tetteh-Ashong, or Paa Joe, as he’s become known, to become one of the most celebrated fantasy coffin makers of the Ga community residing in several villages around Ghana’s capital city, Accra.
“People are buried in Ghana according to their profession whilst alive or what they were addicted to,” Paa Joe told FAD magazine in 2015. “The photographer is buried in a camera while a business tycoon is buried in a Mercedes, Porsche, vintage car or a Ferrari. A king or a family leader is buried in a lion, eagle, fallen tree, rooster or a stool believing life still continues after death.”
Paa Joe’s fame for crafting these “abeduu adeka,” or proverb boxes, led to him being featured in the 1989 exhibition “Les Magiciens de la Terre” at Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Which launched his parallel career as sort of pop artist featured in Western museums and galleries—including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum.
A new exhibition “Celestial City”—at Superhouse gallery, 120 Walker St., New York, from March 13 to April 27, 2024—celebrates the “city itself, creating a portrait of the Big Apple through objects emblematic of the five boroughs,” according to the gallery. The exhibition features two human-scale coffins, one shaped like one of New York’s iconic yellow taxis and one shaped like a giant Heinz ketchup bottle. The exhibition also includes replicas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, a Hermès Birkin handbag, a bagel with a schmear, the Statue of Liberty, a hotdog, an overflowing trash can, and one of the city’s, um, beloved subway rats.
In the early 1950s, Paa Joe’s uncle Kwei (1922–1992) had pioneered the fantasy coffin when crafting a ceremonial palanquin in the shape of a cocoa pod for a chief. “When the chief passed away during its construction, it was repurposed as his coffin,” Superhouse writes. “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 worked with Kwei until 1972, when Paa Joe moved to the coast for two years to carve boats, according to Atlanta’s High Museum. With the money he made, he opened Paa Joe Coffin Works in Nungua in 1976. His workshop—which relocated to Pobiman, in the Greater Accra region, in 2008—has produced more than 2,000 coffins.
“If I go to sleeping,” Paa Joe told the BBC in 2019, “no sleeping. I’m at work in the mind.”
If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content ©Greg Cook 2024 or the respective creators.)
