Ghana Movie Posters - Hand Painted on Recycled Canvas (Used Flour Sacks)

Hand painted Ghana movie posters are unique pieces of authentic African art!

These types of posters were exhibited many times in museums all over the world and are highly collectible!

Here is some information about the origin of this art form.

With the arrival of video and video cassettes in Ghana (West Africa) during 1980s, a small-scale film distribution mobile cinema was created.

The local operators were equipped with a television, a video player and, occasionally, with a portable generator.

They were moving from place to place showing their films - sometimes inside social clubs or houses and at night in open air!

In order to gather as many spectators as possible, they had to advertise their business and they needed huge posters. Because of this, a new art form was born.

After viewing the films, talented artists created large size posters using oil paint on used cotton flour sacks sewn together.

In order to make the poster more attractive, the artist had the freedom to add and change scenes seen, or not seen, in the movie. Each of them is UNIQUE because they express the vision of the artist himself.

As a result of the posters "hard" life (i.e., transported folded or rolled, displayed under the rain and sun for several months during their rounds all over Ghana), most were destroyed and the surviving ones are damaged at the ends of the canvas, are peeling, cracking and/or show other signs of wear.

By the mid-1990s, since television and video were more widely available in Ghana, the popularity of the mobile cinema business declined and almost collapsed.

The profits of the mobile cinema operators decreased, and they could no longer afford the "expensive" artists to paint their posters.

Currently, they use photocopy paper posters in order to cut cost and survive.

For more information concerning this type of art, please read Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Poster from Ghana with over 350 colorful examples of these unique posters.