El Anatsui: Turning Trash Into Treasure

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” No quote could relate better to El Anatsui’s work than this. His first piece of art work was literally, a bag of trash on the road before he transformed it into something amazing; something that was worthy of the Met in New York upon first glimpse, according to Gary Tinterow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of modern art.  “I was blown away,” said Tinterow in an interview with the New York Times.

Where did Anatsui find this golden bag? In his home country of Ghana, lying on the side of the road. For the majority of his life, Anatsui has been involved in art. He studied art at the University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, located in central Ghana. He later taught sculpture at the University of Nigeria. Even though he is known worldwide for art, he has remained the same humble professor he started out as. “He’s almost a kind of messiah for us. . . . But in person, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, remarkable about him,” said a local Nigerian art dealer in the New York Times.

Anatsui’s first medium was sculpture. He used wood, metal, and cloth to design beautiful sculptures used to represent the enormity of the West African culture. “Art grows out of each particular situation, and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up,” said Anatsui. All of the scraps for his work are found in the town of Nsukka, Nigeria where he has lived for the past 28 years. One of his capstone pieces is titled Akua’s Surviving Children; it was created in 1996 for the Danish Slavery Project. Using only wood and metal, Anatsui created this piece but never specifically states its interpretation. Anatsui would rather for his viewers to develop their own opinions and make his artwork their own.

However, his most famous work is surreal and truly one of a kind, made from all recyclable material. Anatsui constructs large tapestries using string and flattened bottle caps. Impressive is an understatement to describe his pieces which keep getting larger and larger with each creation. These pieces represent the history of African slavery economics, which stems from heavy liquor consumption and global consumerism. “When I work with this medium, I have in mind that I am touching or playing around with that time in history…maybe the people who made the drinks chose their names for different reasons, but for me they ring of that episode,” says Anatsui of his bottle caps in an interview with the Washington Post.

His work has been showcased all over the world, including but not limited to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., Venice Biennale, Hayward Gallery in London, Liverpool Biennial,  and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

As well-known as he has become, Anatsui told the New York Times that this is only the beginning of his work. “My ambition is…to get better…I know there’s more up there.”

-Stormm Van Rooi