Vintage Movie Poster "Dead Heat", Ghana

While the Hollywood movie industry is famous for spending literal fortunes on their film fare and its subsequent promotion, not everyone has the means to promote movies with such gross excess: enter the lost art of the Ghana movie poster. During the boom of the videocassette in the 1980s, small-scale mobile theaters popped up around the sub-Saharan country, providing entertainment as they passed through towns and villages. The showings often took place in social clubs, houses or outside in the warm night air, and sometimes only consisted of chairs, a generator, VCR and a television. To promote these shows artists were employed to create large, colorful posters and given full creative license to attract the viewing public. Each of these highly unique and imaginative one-off pieces was created on a large canvas, sometimes employing used flour sacks for the purpose. Artists used oil paints for flexibility and rolled the final result for easy transport to the next show. Today, with much easier access to VHS, DVD and the internet, the mobile cinema has largely died out in the country, and with it the colorful posters that advertised the events. The few outfits that continue the practice do so with much less interesting photocopied images announcing the show.

Country of Origin:

• Hand painted in Ghana

Dimensions:

• W:28" H:42"
  
• Depth x Width x Height

Sustainable Materials:

• Paint on recycled canvas 
• Does not come with a stretcher. The painting is a rolled canvas only. 

About Antique African Art:

Hemingway Gallery regards antique African art as the best artistic expression of aesthetic beauty and storytelling throughout the known history of art. Aside from artistic taste, African art accrues value in different ways than other genres, including use in ceremonial settings as well as age. 50 years is regarded as old or antique when it comes to wood masks and totems. Hemingway Gallery provides both authoritative insight and context into each artifact in the collection, possessing and readily exhibiting direct, intimate knowledge of the source and pedigree. The goal is to preserve and curate one-of-a-kind artifacts of importance while creating a platform for the acquisition of spectacular unique pieces within financial reach.

Our Pricing:

Our pricing correlates directly to the asking prices of artists, artisans and art dealers in the various African countries we collect from and the costs of importing their artwork to the U.S. We need to change the idea that artists should be paid pennies for their fine art just because it comes from Africa. Paying a fair price to our artists and dealers is our number one priority and our pricing reflects that.

Shipping:

• Shipped with FedEx Ground. 
• We ship around the world! Our website is still new and is not yet processing automatic international shipping rates. Please contact us directly for custom shipping quotes outside the mainland USA (including Hawaii and Alaska).

Further Information:

Please email us at info@hemingwayafricangallery.com or call 212-838-3650 with the SKU # for further information on this piece.