In the 1980s, thanks to the invention of video recorders, the first small cinemas came up in the
Greater Accra Region in Ghana. In those years the cinemas were often mobile. Their operators used to travel in the whole region with a selection of movie cassettes, a TV set, a VCR, and a generator, going from one village to the next to show their films. To draw attention to their performances, they announced them with colorful hand-painted movie posters, often painted on recycled flour sacks. These poster paintings were provided by the local film distributors who collaborated with commissioned artists and sign painters like Alex Boateng, Leonardo, Africatta, Muslim, Death is Wonder, Joe Mensah, D.A. Jasper, Stoger, Heavy J, Lawson Chindayen, Bright Obeng, Dan Nyenkumah, Sammy Mensah, and others, who crafted unique images to attract crowds into mobile cinema houses.
Golden age posters (mid 1980s–2000) Since Ghanaians now buy or rent their films or prefer to watch them at home, and with the arrival of digital print technology to Ghana around 2000, the hand-painted movie poster tradition forever changed. The time period from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s is therefore viewed as the Golden Age of Ghanaian Movie Posters when the tradition was its most robust and authentic . Most of the movie houses have had to close in the recent years, and the few that are left can barely afford hand-painted movie posters, using printed ones instead. Therefore, in the Region of Greater Accra, there are hardly any cinemas left that still use hand painted movie posters. Many artists who used to work for the film distributors have turned to other tasks. They are painting street signs that are still very popular in Ghana, and in the Greater Accra Region some are also assisting other artists like
Paa Joe or
Kudjoe Affutu in painting their
figurative coffins,
palanquins and small sculptures. Some sign painters, such as Heavy J., Moses, Jasper, Farkira or Leonardo also work for the international art market, where Ghanaian movie posters as well as the figurative coffins are shown in exhibitions of
contemporary African art where they are receiving more and more attention.
Contemporary and commissioned posters (2001–current) After the year 2000 and the publication of
Extreme Canvas, Ghanaian movie posters began to be exhibited worldwide as high art at galleries. At the same time, the mobile cinema business changed so that local audiences would more often watch movies at home and movie houses would use much cheaper mass-producible digital ads for movies. With the new international market for Ghanaian movie posters, some film poster painters continued to paint not for Ghanaian audiences, but for the international art market, while others retired from the tradition entirely. In the 2010s, there emerged a market for commissioned posters through the internet and social media, largely through the efforts of Deadly Prey Gallery in Chicago. Deadly Prey commissions posters requested by fans to be painted by artists in Ghana. Some of the commissioned artists are original artists of the tradition from before 2000, while others are newer to the genre. These newer posters have an increased emphasis on lurid, gory, and often comical representations of American cinema and TV, from
Star Wars to
Mrs. Doubtfire to
Curb Your Enthusiasm. Contemporary commissioned posters often feature violence, dismemberment, and horror in movies in which these elements do not originally appear. == Stylistic influences ==