How Should Travelers Understand Paa Joe’s Figurative Coffins?

International accounts often call these works fantasy coffins. The Royal Ontario Museum's interpretation uses the local term abebu adekai, translated as containers of proverbs. That language encourages a viewer to ask what a form communicates, rather than assuming that a recognizable car, fish or airplane is merely a visual joke.

Literal resemblance is only part of the explanation. The ROM's Mercedes-Benz-shaped coffin, commissioned from Paa Joe's workshop in 2009, is interpreted through business success; the museum notes that such a form need not mean the deceased actually owned the vehicle. A symbol can speak to status or aspiration as well as an inventory of possessions.

Purpose also matters. An object made for a museum has a different commission history from one made for a funeral, even when both draw on a shared sculptural vocabulary. Neither a bright painted surface nor the label coffin tells you whether an object has ever been used for burial. Follow the individual record instead of supplying an imagined personal story.

The Met connects this sculptural language to figurative palanquins used by Ga-Adangme chiefs in processions. That relationship helps place shaped containers within a wider history of identity and public representation. It is more illuminating than treating every coffin as an isolated invention designed for an international art audience.

Paa Joe's work has nevertheless moved through multiple settings. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's airplane coffin, documented on its Google Arts & Culture collection page, was collected in 1997. Its interpretation connects flight with prestige and a spiritual journey; the record also notes decorative use of wrapping paper in the windows. A familiar commercial aircraft becomes a vehicle for meanings beyond transportation.

Not everything Paa Joe carves is a coffin. The American Folk Art Museum's 2018–19 exhibition Gates of No Return presented wooden models of Ghanaian forts and castles commissioned in 2004–05. Those works address buildings tied to the transatlantic slave trade. Their architectural forms and commemorative purpose should not be confused with functional burial containers or with the historic structures themselves.

A particularly concrete encounter is the Met's For a Musician, dated 2025. On October 21, 2026, the museum listed this guitar-shaped coffin on view in Gallery 199 at The Met Fifth Avenue in New York. The record identifies it as a loan from Superhouse, New York, not a museum purchase. Recheck that status shortly before a visit because a loan's display can change.

Other records are useful for comparison, not guaranteed stops. The ROM's 2009 car-shaped coffin provides a Toronto collection reference, while the Smithsonian airplane record offers a Washington, DC, connection; neither source establishes current public display. The American Folk Art Museum exhibition ended in 2019.

In Greater Accra, arrange any workshop encounter with a confirmed host rather than treating an older museum reference to a workshop location as a current address. Ask about photography, work in progress and whether a commission is private. A funeral is a family's event, not an attraction made public by the visibility of a coffin.