Car-shaped Coffin

My name is Nii Quarcoopome,  and I'm Curator of African Art and head of the Department for Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous Americas at the Detroit Institute of Art. And we are standing in the last suite of the African Gallery.

When people come into the gallery, they see the car. They first of all wonder why a car is sitting in a section of the gallery that talks about the lifecycle. It is not just a sculpture of a car, it is actually a coffin. The artist, Joseph Ashong, who is also referred to popularly as Paa Joe, he is by culture a Ga , and the Ga people in the 1950s decided to change their coffins from the conventional coffins that we use here to figurative coffins.

When I invited Paa Joe to come to the DIA, the objective was to get him, as a master artist, to carve a piece like this for us. Paa Joe arrived here and he asked me the question: what do you want me to cut? And people who are familiar would recognize this sculpture as a 1910 Ford Model T. A coffin like this in the form of a car is supposed to actually help the spirit of the person to be transported from this world to the afterlife.

This is not something that is just shoved into a regular hearse; it is actually carried on the shoulders of people. So the coffin itself is already bulky and heavy, and then they carry it and they don't walk slowly—they dance with it. So it's an amazing spectacle and it really, really makes a very powerful statement, not only about who the person is, but also the wealth of the family. And it's a celebration of a life that is well lived. The difference between this piece and what is actually used in Ghana is that we got to select the wood. In Ghana, the wood that is used is very, very useless wood, totally perishable. So here we have a much more durable world, and given the culture in a museum like ours where conservation is so important, I am absolutely sure that 200 years from now when you go to the afterlife and you come back, you come to find it here.