As many of the contributors to this issue have amply demonstrated, Doran Ross was a man of broad and diverse interests and intense loyalties. While he spent many decades researching the arts of Ghana, with a particular focus on the arts of the Akan-speaking peoples, he undoubtedly had a particular soft spot for the egalitarian and community-based art forms associated with the asafo companies of the Fante peoples of Southern Ghana. Asafo companies existed among all Akan groups, where they functioned as both army and police in precolonial times. However, among the Fante they became structured groups of particular importance, defined by a range of kinetic, performative, and monumental art forms that had been largely ignored by African art scholars.Always interested in multilayered and unconventional topics, Doran set off to study asafo flags in the mid 1970s when, as a graduate student at UCSB under the supervision of Professor Herbert M. Cole, he ventured to Ghana for the first time. The results of his early research were published in The Arts of Ghana, which he co-authored with Cole in 1977, and in the short but seminal pamphlet Fighting with Art: Appliquéd Flags of the Fante Asafo that accompanied a 1979 Fowler Museum exhibition. Quite fittingly, asafo flags were also the topic of Doran's last major publication, a book he and I coauthored to accompany the exhibition Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2016 (Forni and Ross 2017). At the time of his passing, we were in the process of expanding the exhibition for the Fowler Museum; it is now scheduled for the fall of 2022.Colorful, performative, semantically layered, historical yet always current, infinitely reproducible, and often ironic, asafo flags constituted a very fitting subject for Doran's detail-oriented and irreverently inquisitive mind. His earlier publication Fighting with Art outlined the complex setting of these art works, establishing their historical significance and social relevance while also identifying key individuals and families active in the main flag-making workshops of the Central Region at the time of his research. The scope of this first publication established the foundation for the research Doran carried out over the course of his life by regularly attending festivals and performances, visiting flag-making workshops, documenting shrines, paying respects to company leaders, and also keeping the pulse of the art market through frequent engagements with dealers and collectors.1 With his camera around his neck, he was a towering presence in large and small gatherings, perfectly at ease moving through the crowds recording official and unofficial displays of artistry and creativity in the ever-moving flow of asafo performances (Fig 1).As Doran's research and publications have taught us, asafo flags are the rich and complex insignia of Fante military companies. These patrilinear organizations control different areas of a Fante city state, where they perform a number of military and religious duties and are in charge of the safety and well-being of the community. Each Fante village has between two and fourteen asafo companies and all have a number of flags (known as frankaa) whose colors and iconography have often been regulated since the late nineteenth century. New flags may be added to the corpus at the time of the enstoolment of a new leader, to commemorate important events, or to replace older examples when they get ruined or torn. While flags not the only art form associated with these companies, they are the most significant historical and aesthetically layered visual corpus belonging to each company (Fig. 2).Flags are also boastful statements of a company's superiority vis à vis its rivals. The competitive nature of a flag's iconography is well documented in British historical accounts from the late nineteenth century and led to laws restricting the use of images and colors to specific companies within a single town, in the attempt to keep rivalries under control (Ross 1979: 14). Flag-making workshops could gain broad regional reputation and create insignia for a variety of companies, which created a rather intriguing puzzle. To fully understand the history and meaning of a specific flag, one would need to identify not only where and when it may have been made, but also the specific leader or company who commissioned it. The palette, subject matter, and composition of the flag would always be defined by the company leaders who would select the iconography and messaging of each new standard based on the specific symbolic association that a company would have with a certain image or design. In most cases, this information would be critical to understanding the specific meaning of a flag. For example, a flag featuring an elephant and a palm tree could assert: “Only an elephant can pull down a palm tree” if owned by a company whose symbol is the elephant. On the contrary, if a company's emblem is the palm, the reading will likely be “Even the elephant cannot pull down the palm tree” (Forni and Ross 2017: 119). And since most flags found on the market or even in institutional collections lacked both maker and company information, there would be always some interesting connection to explore and research.For several decades, Doran kept photographic records of the flag treasuries of different companies throughout the Central Region (Ross 2010: 4). He also frequented the flag-making workshops of several towns, documenting the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and patterns that allowed certain workshops to maintain regional visibility throughout the years (Fig. 3). Alongside his indefatigable enthusiasm for fieldwork, Doran Ross was a relentless object researcher and cataloguer. After growing the Fowler Museum's collection of asafo flags with several well-documented acquisitions in the 1970s and 1980s, he devoted himself to researching this corpus of artworks as extensively as possible. Many binders in his library contained images and details of hundreds of old and new, historical and artificially aged asafo flags which he encountered in museums, galleries, private collections, and online. He corresponded with scholars, dealers, collectors, sometimes forging longterm relationships based on exchange of images and information. He had an exceptional memory for details and endless curiosity for any form of creative output conceptually or aesthetically inspired by asafo flags: children's books, household décor, printed fabric, fashion, or contemporary art—anything that would display a visual or semantic connection to the ironic, layered, and competitive aesthetic of this art form was a neverending source of delight and intellectual fascination (Fig. 4).Unlike some research questions that Doran would dive into and complete with greater dispatch, asafo flags were lifelong companions, a work in progress that continued to pose new questions and challenges, an art form that constituted a fitting match for his prodigious inquisitiveness. For Doran, asafo iconography was an open-ended quest, as examplesDoran's passion for weaving together information gathered from so many different sources is a remarkable example of how research can help us understand the complexity of objects’ biographies and that of the individuals who created, used, sold, traded, and collected the artworks held in museums and galleries. The asafo collection he assembled for the Fowler Museum, which will be featured in the expanded version of the Art, Honor, and Ridicule exhibition planned for 2022, is a notable case of a thoroughly documented collection with clear provenance. As our field engages critically with the overt and systemic violence of past modes of acquisition and interpretation, Doran's longterm engagement with asafo art and with the many people involved in its making and use will continue to be an inspiring model of scholarship that foregrounds commitment, openness, generosity, human connections, and exchange.