About Hawa Kaba

Hawa Kaba creates mixed media paintings that evoke the artist’s West African heritage and her life in multi-cultural Canada. Using photographic images, words, printed matter, paint, and found materials she evokes the landscape and culture of Africa, the richness of lives of women, the struggle for social justice, and her own personal memories.

Kaba was born in Burkina Faso in West Africa in 1948. Her mother was from Mali and her father from Guinea, and with his work as a diamond merchant the family relocated to a number of West African countries. As a child, Kaba’s affinity for art was stimulated by helping her sister to make tie-died and batik fabrics, and she credits this experience for the “patchwork” form of her mixed media works.

In 1967 Kaba moved to Washington, D.C. with her husband. They moved to Vancouver in 1975, and after living in many Canadian provinces, settled in Ottawa, where the artist still lives. She was divorced in the early 1980s and raised five children on her own. In 1987 Kaba began taking art courses in a wide range of disciplines, a process that she pursued for the next five years. A collage project in a course on abstraction proved to be a crucial turning point in her work. With fellow students, Kaba formed an artists’ group devoted to mixed media work and began working with collaged materials and paint. Among her influences she acknowledges Robert Rauschenberg, a pioneer in the art of combining images from disparate sources, and Jackson Pollock, for the painterly energy of his work.

The first phase of Kaba’s collage work began with using found images, writings in a variety of languages, and archival materials, such her father’s government documents. The next stage of her work introduced a wide variety of materials, such as leather, hand-made paper, netting, and corrugated cardboard. In the paintings that followed, Kaba introduced a greater variety of textures, including paint with gritty admixtures to create highly tactile surfaces. The artist’s recent series, The Colors of the Mandé, was inspired by the artist’s trip to the traditional homelands of the Mandingo people in West Africa, and abstractly evokes both the landscape and the culture.

Kaba’s social awareness has formed a “raison d’ệtre” for her art. She has expressed in her work the central importance of her African and Muslim heritage, and its joining with the other cultures in her life in Canada. Issues such as the struggle for racial justice in South Africa and in the United States, the African Diaspora, and public education recur in her paintings. Her works convey Kaba’s interest in women and women’s issues is conveyed. She sees her own work as an artist as an example to other African women who have traditionally been excluded from creative endeavors.

Kaba has exhibited her paintings extensively in solo exhibitions including three at the Spence Gallery, Toronto; at the Théâtre La Nouvelle Scéne, Ottawa; at Artists of the World, Calgary, and in many group exhibitions. Her work is in a number of public and corporate collections.