Kofi Kayiga

Art Brokerage: Kofi Kayiga Jamaican Artist: (b Kingston, Dec 1943). Kofi Kayiga is a Jamaican painter and teacher. He studied at the Jamaica School of Art, Kingston, and the Royal College of Art, London, and started exhibiting in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he lectured at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. He headed the painting department at the Jamaica School of Art from 1973 to 1981, subsequently moving to Boston, MA, where he lectured at the Massachusetts College of Art. Kayiiga's work showed an emotional and spiritual response to his experience as a black man in a post-colonial New World environment and his allegiance to Africa as his ancestral homeland. Most of his paintings and works on paper are abstract or semi-abstract with a strong emphasis on colour, pattern and rhythm, for example Untitled (Apartheid) (1978; Kingston, N.G.). They represent a synthesis of North American Abstract Expressionism and the artist's African-American cultural and philosophical heritage. His paintings have a spontaneous, discordant and moody quality reminiscent of jazz music, another New World art form. Listings wanted.