Doran Ross was arguably the leading scholar of Akan art and visual culture, who, over the course of a very productive forty-five-year career, published eight books, over forty articles and book chapters, and countless shorter pieces dealing with the arts of the Akan and, on occasion, other parts of Ghana. References to his scholarship abound in the works of many scholars who have been writing about Akan art over the last half century, including the two of us. Rather than simply enumerate the contributions that Doran has made to Akan visual studies, we decided to present an edited transcription of a conversation we had in April 2021 that provided us the opportunity to reflect upon both our personal memories of Doran as well as the impact his writing and curatorial projects have had on the field of African art history. For those readers who might be interested, we have provided, at the end of this reflection, a list of Doran's publications that deal with the arts of Ghana, particularly Akan societies.RS: So, Nii, how long did you know Doran, when did you guys first meet?NQ: In 1979, when I joined the UCLA art history graduate program, I was lucky to have found a part-time job in the Fowler Museum's registration department. During that stint as an object preparator, I first met Doran Ross, who was then visiting from UC Santa Barbara. After I learned that he had carried out field research in Ghana and knew and loved Ghanaian culture, he and I struck up an enduring friendship. Later, in 1981, when he became associate director and curator of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania at the Museum of Cultural History at UCLA, which later became the Fowler Museum, I was fortunate to have witnessed firsthand the early stages of the institution's decades-long transformation under his stewardship, which struck me as a model in museum practice. Not long after, he asked if I could assist with his first exhibition project at the museum, Akan Transformations (1983a), which I accepted. Doran might not have intentionally conceived this early relationship with me as a form of academic mentorship. Neither did I. However, in retrospect, the experience did indeed profoundly inspire my career in the curatorial field. Working on the Akan Transformations exhibition was an eye-opening learning experience. Although I grew up in Ghana, the project was my first serious foray into the scholarship on Akan aesthetics, art criticism, and art history; it also broadened my familiarity with other Ghanaian visual traditions. Eventually, when Doran asked me to contribute a short essay to the exhibition's accompanying publication, I felt immensely honored. What about you, Ray, when and where did you first meet Doran?RS: Well, I met Doran a couple of years before you did, during the summer of 1977. I had just finished writing my MA thesis at the University of Washington and was teaching a couple of classes at California State University, Los Angeles. One Friday, I drove up to Santa Barbara to meet, for the first time, Herbert (Skip) Cole and Doran, who were then in the throes of wrapping up work on The Arts of Ghana (1977a) exhibition. I met the two of them for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Isla Vista and had a stimulating conversation with them about their recent fieldwork for the exhibition and about plans for my dissertation. I had read Doran's first published article on Akan forowa (1974) and his then-recently published piece on Akan sword ornaments (1977b), and recall being impressed with the scholarship, but it wasn't until I had met him—driving back to Los Angeles that day—I remember thinking, wow, that guy [Doran] has his s∗∗t together! It was apparent that Doran, who was then barely 30 years old, had already established a firm foundation for a formidable career as a leading authority on the arts of Ghana, particularly Akan visual art. The Arts of Ghana, by the way, was awesome. Both the exhibition and accompanying volume still stand as the single most comprehensive presentations of Ghanaian visual arts. I was fortunate enough to participate in a wonderful symposium dealing with the arts of Ghana that Skip and Doran organized at UCLA later that year. All the leading scholars of Ghanaian art and material culture were there and some of the papers were published in African Arts a couple of years later. It was where I presented my first scholarly paper!NQ: Yeah, Doran's emergence in Ghanaian art studies was significant and timely, occurring as it did not long after the passing of A.A.Y. Kyerematen (1916–1976), a pioneer of Ghanaian art studies. Doran stepped up to fill the void left by Kyerematen and his compatriot Kofi Antubam (1922–1964), building significantly on their work and expanding upon it for a global audience. After co-curating The Arts of Ghana, Doran made Akan art his primary research focus. While the exhibition showcased the richness and diversity of Ghanaian art, it was the publication of Akan Transformations: Problems in Akan Ghanaian Art History (1983a), which he coedited with Timothy Garrard, that set the stage for much of the scholarship that defined Doran's career as an expert on the arts of the Akan.RS: Indeed. Both you and I contributed to that collection of essays that really pushed the limits of the subfield by interrogating various topics that had previously received little attention. Some of the essays reflected on objects that did not fit the canon of Akan art and were considered “problematic.” But examining them revealed important insights about Akan history and cultural practices. One of my favorite essays was a piece Doran wrote with Ray Reichert (1983c) about a workshop in Kumasi that produced “modern antiquities” (a.k.a. fakes). Thus, Akan Transformations and The Arts of Ghana were early products of Doran's life-long passion for collaboration—he really enjoyed working with others.By the way, one other early memory I have of Doran involved a car that he and I had purchased together in 1979. The archaeologist Merrick Posnansky sold us a Renault 4 that he had purchased for his archaeological program at Begho. Doran and I shared the vehicle for a couple of years, while I was pursuing dissertation research and Doran, during the summer of 1980, continued his research on Asante regalia and Fante asafo flags. In September, just before Doran was about to head back to California, he and I spent a few days traveling in the Central Region, spending time in the towns of Mankessim, Saltpond, Komantse, Abandze, Anomabu, Cape Coast, and Elmina. This was my first visit to the central coast of Ghana and what a great treat it was to have Doran as a guide, introducing me to several of the forts along the coast, to the concrete posuban (2007) built by the Fante asafo (military) companies in each of these communities (Fig. 1), and to some of the tailors from whom Doran had commissioned the distinctive appliqué asafo flags (1979, 2004a, 2017) he was studying. I had the opportunity to experience what Doran did best, collecting and documenting material culture. Indeed, Doran was the inveterate collector, a collector's collector. At that time, and for years to come, he was interested in creating a comprehensive collection of asafo flags, examples from different communities and representing the vast repertoire of visualized proverbs associated with asafo companies—a collection that he would eventually donate to the Fowler Museum. But his method involved much more than collecting; it also included extremely thorough documentation of what he encountered in the field (Fig. 2). This, in fact, was Doran's modus operandi, a framework for virtually all his field research in Ghana. He took voluminous notes in his trademark black bound notebooks and he took photographs, a lot of photographs! He was a superb photographer. He was fastidious about keeping all this documentation organized and accessible. In later years, on more than one occasion, when visiting with Doran in the director's office at the Fowler, I marveled at how he could easily find a specific piece of information in his voluminous fieldnotes or a specific image in the thousands of field photographs he had stored in big three-ring binders.NQ: I used to call Doran the “Documenter-in-Chief”! The archive he amassed of oral and written texts and especially photographs is amazing, which is why I am delighted that the Getty Research Institute (GRI) agreed to properly preserve and make it available to researchers. Doran was indeed excellent with the camera, which he employed not only for object photography, but also for documenting artmaking and activities that contextualized art. Consequently, his photographs have been reproduced in publications of many other scholars (like me) and in museum galleries around the world (Figs. 3–4). His stunning portraits of Akan chiefs wearing sumptuous kente and the gold trappings of royalty have been particularly popular, to the extent that one sees them floating around the internet, often unattributed! Sharing his field photographs speaks to what you mentioned earlier about Doran's commitment to collaboration. He was extremely generous, always willing to share the fruits of his research. I benefitted on more than one occasion from his largesse, notably when he allowed me to use a number of his priceless images in a recent special edition of the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts dealing with Akan art (Fig. 5). Also, you might not know this, in 2008, I lost my entire library in a storage fire. Recognizing the potential impact on my scholarship, Doran assembled and shipped to me several of the Fowler Museum's priceless volumes along with some of his past, out-of-print publications, which I will forever cherish. Subsequently, he routinely sent me his latest publications, which I reciprocated.And you are right about the care he took in organizing his field records. I also experienced Doran's extraordinary attention to detail and accuracy on more than one occasion. But one, specifically, is hard to forget. I recall when he held back the publication of an article he had written until he was able to get accurate translations of a few archaic Fante proverbs. When Doran learned that, unlike everyday sayings, archaic proverbs are tricky business that require a deeper knowledge of the Fante language and philosophy, he asked if I might be able to find an elderly Fante speaker with that expertise to help unpack the meanings of the proverbs.RS: Speaking of proverbs, anyone familiar with Ghana is aware of the important relationship between visual and verbal communication in Akan society, a relationship in which Doran was keenly interested. Following upon the writing of Kofi Antubam and Alex Kyerematen, he pushed to new limits the analysis of the “verbal/visual nexus” in Akan art, a term that Skip Cole introduced in the publication that accompanied The Arts of Ghana to describe the practice of giving visual form to a vast repertoire of proverbs and aphorisms that are a hallmark of Akan culture. Like the Fante proverbs you mentioned a moment ago, this approach is found in the books and articles he produced throughout his career. Whether writing about Akan gold regalia, asafo flags, or kente, his masterful interpretation of Akan proverbs played a vital role in unpacking the multilayered cultural significance of Akan art. It is not surprising that Doran's work always incorporated iconographic analysis whether he was studying figurative or nonfigurative imagery (Fig. 6). He had a particular method for analyzing Akan visual culture that he formulated very early in his career. His approach was basically phenomenological. No matter what he was discussing, he deployed the same meticulous method for describing and interpreting Akan visual culture. In this regard, he was very much a traditional art historian, always focused on the object.NQ: Yes, this approach can be seen in many of Doran's publications. A couple of monographs that documented two important collections of Akan gold regalia, Gold of the Akan from the Glassell Collection (2002a) and Royal Arts of the Akan: West African Gold in Museum Liaunig (2009) stand out in this regard. And then there are several articles he wrote early in his career that focus on specific types of regalia: for instance, a couple written for African Arts, one dealing with sword ornaments (1977b) and another with counselors’ staffs (1982a). He also enjoyed writing about single objects, as it offered an opportunity to deploy his modus operandi to explore the object's meaning and set it in cultural and historic contexts. As a matter of fact, Doran's last publications were a couple of short essays that considered two gold state sword ornaments in the Dallas Museum of Art (2018a; 2018b). The verbal/visual nexus is at the heart of all this work. But it is important to remember another theme that runs through much of his writing on the Akan— it involved interrogating the object as a source of insight regarding cultural exchange among Akan states, as well as between Akan and non-Akan societies. In Akan Transformations he had a couple of interesting articles; one that I found particularly intriguing argued for the Islamic origins for a distinctive double-bladed Akan sword (1983b). Another favorite is “The Heraldic Lion in Akan Art: A Study of Motif Assimilation in Southern Ghana” (1982b) that traced the image of the lion in Akan to European heraldic imagery. While Doran and I did not agree on everything, we frequently shared our candid opinions and insights about Ghanaian art. For instance, I will always cherish our lively debates on who are better weavers, Ewes or Asante. So, Ray, what do think is Doran's most important contribution to the study of Akan visual culture?RS: I would have to say, hands down, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (1998a), a magnificent exhibition organized by the Fowler Museum and the Newark Museum and accompanied by a book that stands as the definitive text dealing with the iconic Ghanaian strip-woven cloth (Fig. 7). Wrapped in Pride, perhaps more than any of his other projects, reminds us that Doran's research has had an impact on audiences far larger and more diverse than most scholars, especially when it has been presented in museum exhibitions that he has curated or co-curated and their accompanying publications (see Quick, this issue). Talk about impact, the kente exhibition traveled in various iterations to more than forty venues, and no doubt was experienced by hundreds of thousands of people! For me, what made this project so important was how it offered a deep dive into the history and sociopolitical significance of kente, not only in Ghana, but here in the United States. I was impressed with the magnificent product of many years of research, but what really stood out was the collaborative process of developing the exhibition and its programming that involved mostly African American high school students in Los Angeles and Newark, respectively, as co-curators. This was groundbreaking community-centered museum work.NQ: I have to agree! It was an amazing project, in which I again was very fortunate to have been involved. I believe you were as well, weren't you? However, for me, Wrapped in Pride exemplified the remarkable clarity and accessibility of Doran's writing. Always aware of his museum audience, he directed his writing at the non-specialist. Even articles he published in academic journals are easy to read. When I was teaching, I used several of Doran's articles, like the ones I mentioned a moment ago on sword ornaments and counselors’ staffs. I suspect you have as well.RS: You bet! Speaking of Wrapped in Pride, I think we need to wrap up our conversation. I guess the last thing I'll mention is another experience I had with Doran in Ghana. At the beginning of our conversation, I talked about traveling with him along the coast in 1980; Doran and I were never in Ghana at the same time again, until almost thirty-five years later. In 2014, I was attending the Akwasidae Keseε celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Asantehene's enstoolment at the Baba Yara Stadium in Kumasi. I had been issued a journalist's pass so that I could move around and photograph the magnificent durbar that included the chiefs of the Asante nation wearing sumptuous cloths and gold ornaments, surrounded by attendants carrying state regalia (Fig. 8). While roaming around the stadium, I saw the gray-haired head of an obroni (a White guy), sticking up above the crowd, and I quickly recognized it was Doran. I did not know he'd be attending the durbar; I didn't even know he was in Ghana! But I was not surprised to see him—this was what Doran loved doing most, experiencing the performance of Akan culture. We greeted each other, chatted a bit, but soon resumed our respective tasks of documenting the grand event—there was work to be done! I believe this was one of the last times Doran was able to visit Ghana. How about you, Nii? Any final thoughts?NQ: Sure, I have a few. In Ghana, Doran's passing has generated profound sadness among his Ghanaian friends and colleagues. Even young scholars who never met him acknowledge benefiting from his immense scholarship. However, for those with whom he frequently interacted in the field, he became more like family. As one who relied so heavily on indigenous knowledge for his scholarship, Doran had a profound respect for the elderly; after all, elders are tradition. This, coupled with his careful attention to etiquette and protocols, gave him access to royalty as well as palace officials and artists. But some also remembered his joviality and empathy, two traits that garnered him tremendous goodwill and admiration within the communities he researched. On a few occasions, I marveled when a research subject inquired before an interview whether I knew Doran and then proceeded to praise him. As I shared news of his death during my recent trip to Ghana in November 2020, there were expressions of sorrow and fond memories from many quarters: functionaries at the Asante royal palace at Manhyia, Kumasi; Fante flag makers; stool carvers at Ahwia; kente cloth weavers and shopkeepers at Bonwire; adinkra-stamped cloth artists at Ntonso; and Kwame Akoto (a.k.a. “Almighty God”), Kumasi's most famous “sign painter” with whom Doran had a special relationship (2014a; 2014b)—in fact, I believe Doran was working on a project with his colleagues at the Fowler dealing with Almighty God when he passed away (see Forni, this issue) (Fig. 9).Doran often joked about Ghanaians’ love for funerals. But he also understood why funerals matter, especially the critical importance of offering the departed a respectful transition to the afterlife and allowing the community to celebrate a life well-lived while grieving. His numerous Ghanaian friends and “family” are saddened that the pandemic has robbed them of the opportunity to mourn him the African way—to sing traditional funerary dirges, weep, drum, and party to highlife music and liquor. But they are consoled by the Akan proverb: “Owu atwer, baako nfro” (lit. “death's ladder is not meant for only one person”), to wit, “death is inevitable.”