Montague Contemporary is pleased to announce Mark Anthony: Ghana Concert Party Paintings, the first solo exhibition in New York devoted to the celebrated Ghanaian billboard painter whose heroic, hand-lettered panels once proclaimed the nightly dramas of Ghana’s itinerant Concert Party theatre. Bringing together nine monumental works dating from 1985–1997, the presentation invites viewers to encounter the vivid, cinematic imagery that animated village squares and urban markets across West Africa for more than half a century.
Painted on hinged plywood with glossy household enamel, Anthony’s double-sided “poster-boards” blur the boundary between public signage, popular cinema, and moral storytelling. Scenes of jealous lovers, wayward royals, avenging spirits, and gospel redemption unfold in saturated colour, each captioned with proverbs in Akan or English that still resonate today. Four of the paintings on view were reproduced in art historian Michelle Gilbert’s seminal catalogue Hollywood Icons, Local Demons (2000), a text that first positioned Concert Party billboards within global visual-culture discourse.
ABOUT MARK ANTHONY
Mark Anthony (b. 1943, Agona Swedru, Ghana; d. 2020) began his career lettering commercial signs before becoming the principal painter for celebrated troupes such as Super Yaw Ofori’s Band and City Boys Band during the genre’s 1980s heyday. He is widely regarded by scholars, including ethnomusicologist John Collins, as the maestro who translated the theatrical dynamism of Concert Party into a compelling graphic idiom—at once humorous, macabre, and didactic.
Anthony’s work now forms part of major public collections, among them the Yale University Art Gallery, North Carolina Museum of Art, Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, and the Zillman Art Museum–University of Maine. Paintings have been featured in travelling exhibitions from Accra to Los Angeles, yet the current show marks the first occasion that a focused body of his panels is exhibited in New York