Amoako Boafo
Artnet

Sarah Cascone, Artnet, August 27, 2021

Three Amoako Boafo paintings were just launched into space aboard Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship.

 

This morning, a trio of the artist’s paintings that were made for New Shepard, the reusable suborbital rocket built by Jeff Bezos’s private aerospace manufacturer, Blue Origin, took off for space.

 

The paintings—Self Portrait with Pink Tulips (2021), Shormeh’s Gold Earrings (2021), and White and Gold Head Wrap (2021)—make up Boafo’s “Suborbital Triptych,” which adorned three parachute panels on the ship. One image is a self portrait, and the others are portraits of his mother and of his childhood friend, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, who is also an artist.

 

“A self-portrait looking up to the skies best explains what this project means to me. I grew up knowing the sky was the limit and now I get to work on a project that goes beyond the sky as we know it,” Boafo said in a statement. “This signifies what is possible when creatives like myself are given the chance to not only break the glass ceiling, but go above it.”