In 2008, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) commissioned El Anatsui’s large-scale metal wall hanging titled Rain Has No Father? The sculpture utilizes the artist’s signature bottle cap method that has recently helped him attract international attention. Anatsui’s wall hangings are constructed from thousands of used liquor bottle caps, flattened and woven together to create luminous tapestries as magnificent in their formal appeal as they are rich in cultural and historical allusion, and since its acquisition, Rain Has No Father? has become a well-publicized highlight of DAM’s permanent collection. However, somewhat controversially, the work hangs in the museum’s African gallery alongside Mende masks, musical instruments, and nkisi nkondi figures as opposed to the modern and contemporary gallery where most institutions display Anatsui’s work. This curatorial decision in DAM’s permanent collection galleries is not entirely surprising given that the museum is dedicated to revealing traces of continuity and change that problematize the traditional versus contemporary binary, and a similar framing was pervasive throughout DAM’s installation of the traveling retrospective, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa.

When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, organized by Lisa Binder, assistant curator at the Museum for African Art, New York, features over sixty works spanning El Anatsui’s forty-year career in Ghana and Nigeria, and includes paintings, installations, ceramics, drawings, wood sculptures, and eight of his noted metal wall sculptures. Despite this diversity of media, his oeuvre is interlinked via malleability of form, assemblage, and attention to materiality, all of which become most evident in the artist’s well-known bottle cap sculptures. Furthermore, the works are organized neither chronologically nor entirely by medium, which fosters a suspenseful experience full of literal twists and turns given DAM’s notoriously disorienting postmodern interior. Interestingly, to view the entire exhibition, visitors are required to take a detour through a small room within the museum’s African collection that juxtaposes contemporary African art with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century masks and musical instruments. This abbreviated example of Africa’s visual culture ostensibly serves as a type of framing device that situates Anatsui’s work within the context of a long and complicated narrative in which past practices assist in the forging of a postcolonial identity.

While the bottle cap wall hangings made internationally popular by Anatsui’s participation in the 2007 Venice Biennale are, not surprisingly, on display, the exhibition also includes a selection of the artist’s early works taken from his own collection. During a DAM lecture featuring an onstage interview with El Anatsui, Nancy Blomberg, the museum’s curator of native arts and chief curator, described the artist’s early acrylic paintings as the lynchpin of the exhibition, claiming that they convey the thematic and formal consistency of Anatsui’s work. Utilizing, in one example, a bold green, red, and violet color palette to depict undulating squares and rectangles pieced together as if a painted patchwork, these paintings bear an undeniable resemblance to his wall hangings. They elucidate the artist’s tendency to mark, subtract, and reconfigure through the process of layering colors, and oftentimes the paintings appear as a type of preparatory sketch or thought experiment that Anatsui finally solves in his later sculptural works. During the interview, Anatsui claimed to have become frustrated with painting due to the medium’s lack of history, a history of locality, colonization, and consumption that he would later find to be manifest in liquor bottle caps.

Anatsui’s retrospective also features a selection of the artist’s wooden wall sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s, one of which serves as the exhibition’s namesake. Works like Old Cloth Series (1993) consist of panels of wood that are easily assembled, dismantled, and rebuilt in different configurations, another example of how Anatsui has been working through similar formal issues throughout the bulk of his forty-year career. The wooden planks were shaped with a chainsaw and then scorched and gouged into a pattern of small squares with intricate designs, some of which are painted with violet and red to mimic the detailed printed fabrics associated with Ghana’s textile tradition. Indeed, from acrylic paintings, to wooden wall sculptures, to aluminum bottle cap wall hangings, the notion of textiles remains prevalent throughout Anatsui’s works, the richness and diversity of which serve as a reminder that Anatsui had a thriving international career long before the Venice Biennale transformed him into an art star.

The exhibition is bookended by two installations, Open(ing) Market (2004) and Peak Project (1999), both of which speak overtly to the artist’s tendency to manipulate words and their connotations. The result is a thematically consistent exhibition of double meanings. In a corridor near the exhibition’s entrance, Open(ing) Market consists of 1,767 tin boxes lined with colorfully painted newspaper, their exteriors painted black with red crescent patterns. Identical to tins sold in African markets, Anatsui commissioned the boxes from local artisans, and they sit, lids cocked, on the gallery floor. During his interview, Anatsui claimed that his primary interest in the tin boxes is the unknown origin of the red crescent shapes; therefore, the overwhelming accumulation of boxes, and thus red crescents, is transformed into a thing that infiltrates from the “outside.” Among other references, the red crescents might allude to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, a humanitarian organization with societies in almost every nation in the world, including Ghana and Nigeria. Further, the installation’s title, Open(ing) Market is a clear reference to the African markets in which the tin boxes are sold as well as to open market economies. Referring to products, political systems, ideas, and images, Open(ing) Market crystallizes the ways in which multiple meanings and wordplay imbue Anatsui’s works. Similarly, Peak Project in the final room of the exhibition deals with the fluidity of meaning and the ambiguity of words. The installation consists of Peak Milk tin container tops woven together into dozens of two-foot by four-foot sheets. The sheets are then wrapped and folded into cone-like forms that mimic a metallic mountain range. A popular brand of condensed milk distributed widely in West Africa, Peak Milk tin tops are the detritus of Anatsui’s surroundings in which internationally packaged and imported products are prevalent, and recycling practices are limited. Therefore, Anatsui works with the materials that his surroundings produce to enact a transformative process that creates an entirely new environment. While Open(ing) Market and Peak Project are undoubtedly strong installations to begin and end the exhibition, they are also two of the most surprising, unexpected, and exciting works in the retrospective because they diverge from the rest of the exhibition aesthetically while remaining conceptually consistent.

Given that El Anatsui’s retrospective is touring the United States over the course of three years, it is of note that his malleable metal sculptures come with no installation instructions, and therefore each work becomes a collaboration between artist and curator—in this case, DAM’s Blomberg. In each iteration of the exhibition, the folding and draping sculptures are contingent upon the processes of installation, rendering each variation of the traveling exhibition formally distinct. However, this concept of shared agency is especially fitting for Anatsui’s works given that he claims his bottle cap sculptures, constructed of found objects denoting consumption, are only imbued with meaning as a result of their use. Therefore, his medium is charged, linking his final work to the people who used the materials originally, as his found objects are cloaked in a history that precedes him, and his works are eventually given form in a context that precludes him.

Indeed, if Anatsui’s Denver Art Museum retrospective is the result of an intersection of the artist’s works and the curator’s installation, the highlight of the exhibition is undoubtedly Stressed World (2011), the exhibition’s largest and most recently fabricated bottle cap tapestry. While many of Anatsui’s metal works call attention to their own perceived fragility, Stressed World is almost entirely transparent, as if the center of the sculpture is worn, brittle, and ready to collapse under its own weight. This discernible tenuousness is only exacerbated by the dramatic decision to suspend the sculpture from the ceiling and away from the walls as opposed to hanging it on an ordinary wall mount, which is how Anatsui’s works are usually displayed and how Stressed World was installed in previous versions of the retrospective. Positioned in front of a large window, the sculpture is illuminated through its translucent center, in turn exaggerating the intricacy of the woven red, black, yellow, green, and violet bottle caps. Stressed World as a discrete work is the pinnacle of the retrospective, and its installation is a high point in terms of the exhibition’s curatorial voice.

The Denver Art Museum’s framing of Anatsui’s work as specifically African rather than more broadly contemporary was perhaps the most limiting aspect of the exhibition. While it is clear that national identity is a key component of Anatsui’s work, it seems to have been emphasized at the expense of a more transnational perspective that may have helped to elucidate key issues of postcolonialism, consumerism, and globalization inherent in his oeuvre. In fact, the only exhibition text that discusses the aforementioned issues is wall labels featuring quotes from the artist. It is also worth noting that the exhibition catalogue, edited by Binder, tackles these issues, in turn providing a more well-rounded discussion that balances the formal and conceptual elements of the works. However, at the Denver Art Museum, greater acknowledgment of how Anatsui’s works create real and metaphorical links between Africa and Europe, and even Africa and the world, would have enriched the educational component of the exhibition.

Returning to the onstage interview with Anatsui, the palpable elation in the sold-out auditorium is perhaps the most accurate gauge of the overall success of the exhibition. Anatsui’s career retrospective transforms the sometimes awkward spaces of DAM’s galleries into a habitat that questions the idea that “beauty” and contemporary art are mutually exclusive.