Berj Gallery has opened its first solo exhibition by Ewuresi Archer, presenting “A Love Letter With Teeth,” a new body of work that explores memory, beauty and the tensions beneath everyday life.
The exhibition, which runs from April 26 through July 7, marks a significant debut for Archer, a Ghanaian-American whose practice spans painting, printmaking and sculpture. Developed during an eight-week residency in the coastal village of Busua, the works draw on her experiences navigating the complexities of place, identity and belonging.
A Love Letter With Teeth examines Ewuresi Archer’s experiences of the unsettling nature of what beauty often helps conceal when one looks at our ways of inhabiting a place, and our distorted realities that have been absorbed into the everyday and renamed normal. Developed during Archer’s 8-week residency with the gallery in the fishing village of Busua, this body of work began as a love letter to Ghana, that is shaped by diasporic yearning and the pull of ancestral land, however, it opens into a deeper confrontation with the realities that have come to feel ordinary. Archer presses on the violences, dislocations, and distortions that structure everyday life, while turning toward land, memory, and spirit as sites of return. It takes us through Busua not as postcard, but as lived experience, seductive, unstable, funny, heavy, and at times brutal.
Running through a number of the paintings is the recurring figure of the fly. For Archer, the fly stands in for the men who hovered around her and other women in Busua: intrusive, persistent, difficult to shake. What first appears as a small buzzing disturbance gathers force through repetition, becoming part of the exhibition’s wider language of gendered tension, discomfort, and unease. Her surfaces are built through accumulation. Paint, chalk pastel, and yarn gather across batik fabrics that serve as her canvas, while plastic waste, bottles, and bags are folded into the work as both material and residue. Archer’s crochet-based sculptural forms extend this language of entanglement into three dimensions: crocheted from cut-up T-shirts, yarn, tangled with found debris, and anchored by discarded fishnet. They carry the tension between improvisation and ruin. Together, these materials form a visual language in which beauty is never separate from what has been discarded, and where texture begins to speak of intimacy, excess, fragility, and survival.
What Archer offers, then, is not resolution but a sharper way of seeing, and perhaps a different way of inhabiting what has too often been naturalized, romanticized, or ignored. Her work stays with the tension between love and disillusionment, between the pull of beauty and the realities that fracture it. In doing so, it asks what it might mean to refuse the numbness of normalization and to approach land, memory, and self through a deeper, more searching form of attention. Not the postcard. Not the performance of national romance. Something messier, more sentient, and much more true.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ewuresi Archer is a Ghanaian-American multi-disciplinary artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She was born in Burlington, Vermont, to Ghanaian parents and raised in Ghana, where her artistic journey began at Akosombo International School. As a visual art student, she was introduced to traditional ceramics, painting, and graphic design, which formed the foundation of her creative practice. After graduating in 2017, she took a gap year dedicated to honing her skills, completing a welding internship at Accents and Arts that further broadened her material knowledge and shaped the layered approach she now brings to her art practice. Archer later moved to the United States to attend the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting with an emphasis in Printmaking and a concentration in Creative Writing in 2022.
Her work places Ghanaian culture at the center, celebrating its vibrancy while acknowledging the complexities of its coexistence with Western influence. This duality has always been a part of Archer’s lived experience, and she explores it through a glowing, saturated color palette and scrappy, energetic marks that depict everyday scenes; pounding fufu, getting a haircut, eating foods tied to memory and tradition. Through palette knife scraping, layering, and intentional distortion, she pushes her imagery toward the edge of abstraction, leaving just enough for viewers to recognize and connect with. The effect mirrors her own feelings of nostalgia and longing for a culture that, though deeply hers, has often felt just beyond reach due to her diasporic upbringing. Archer’s practice is both an invitation and a reclamation: an invitation for those unfamiliar with Ghanaian traditions to celebrate them, and a reclamation for herself and others who have been made to feel their culture was not enough. Her art is a love letter to heritage, beauty, and belonging.
Ewuresi has exhibited nationally, with solo shows including Alluring Souls at The Beltline Project in Detroit and You Are Invited: Your Hands and Mouth Are Not at Akron Soul Train. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as Waking Dream at River House Arts, MAPC: We Want More at Reinberger Gallery, and I Am My Best Work at The Painting Center in New York. She co-curated a two-person, site-specific installation for Rooms to Let in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood, demonstrating her commitment to collaborative and experimental approaches to exhibition-making.
Beyond her studio practice, Archer is an active community builder and educator. She has led workshops in screen printing and collage at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Art, taught art to audiences ranging from children to adults, and participated in artist lectures at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She has also designed posters and album covers for organizations such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition, she serves as co-coordinator of the Black Arts Showcase Cleveland, a platform dedicated to celebrating and supporting Black artists in her community.Her work has been recognized with the First Place Paul and Norma Tikkanen Painting Prize and has been featured in publications such as Canvas Rebel and New Art Examiner.
ABOUT BERJ GALLERY
Berj Gallery is the leading transformative art gallery in Ghana, founded in 1996 by Joyce Quarshie, an avid art collector. Joyce Quarshie has championed West African Art for over 30 years and boasts a prominent collection of Paintings, Bronzes and wooden Sculptures. Berj Gallery is home to some of Ghana’s leading artists, showcasing their paintings, sculptures and photographs in a warm, friendly and inviting atmosphere. From acclaimed painters, photographers, traditional sculptors, to stars of the future, Berj Gallery will present major exhibitions in a fusion of local and international celebration of art.