Columbus Museum of Art
This exhibition celebrates the life and work of Kojo Kamau (1939-2016). For more than five decades, his striking photographs chronicled the city’s changing landscape and importance as a cultural and political crossroads. In addition to his own photography, Kojo was an essential supporter of the arts. In 1979, he helped establish the Art for Community Expression (ACE), a non-profit venture to help promote the work of black artists.
Born Robert Jones in 1939, he changed his name to Kojo Kamau in 1970, which means “unconquerable quiet one” in Yoruba, one of the many languages spoken in West Africa. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, The Ohio State University, and the Columbus College of Art and Design to learn his craft. From 1964 until 1994, Kojo was the chief photographer for The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He passed away in 2016. Throughout his long and prolific career, Kojo used a variety of photographic formats to create a lasting body of work about and for the Columbus community.
