Kofi Sarfo-Kantanka

Kofi is a Nashville-based contemporary Visual Artist and Physician from Ghana. He started using charcoal for drawing in Ghana at a very young age with his friends. He is best known for his vivid charcoal portraits and vibrant abstract paintings. He moved from Ghana to Portland, Oregon in 2004. He graduated from the University of Oregon with Bachelor of Science in Biology and completed his Doctorate in Medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. The content of his work is inspired by BLACK Music, BLACK American experiences and personal responses to what is going on around him.

After more than a decade of no active drawing and increasingly challenging life experiences, he naturally reconnected to his childhood obsession with charcoal and found great comfort, sense of control and order in this chaotic world by creating charcoal portraits. Thousands of miles away from his motherland, he uses a rectangular block in his paintings to represent the warmth of his mother’s arm, a shield against his unpredictable and chaotic world.

It is Kofi’s goal to continue to create a robust archive of paintings depicting his experiences, journey of his thoughts and exploration of color, form and texture in art as app...

Meharry Medical College - Nashville, TN
Opoku Ware Senior Secondary School - GH
University of Oregon - Eugene, OR