Black Mermaid

Name: Black Mermaid
Brand: Raknida
Price: 55.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Emmanuel Abakah

Digital portrait of a young Black girl with a full afro and a small gold crown, blue eyes, surrounded by red, pink and violet fish in turquoise water.

$55.00

A girl with a full afro and a small gold crown rules the ocean. It is Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Abakah's answer to the fairy tales that left Black girls out.

Black Mermaid is a Studio Edition: 20 museum-quality art prints in each size, each numbered in its white border. Every artwork comes with its Cultural Passport.

The Cultural Passport

Every order comes with the heritage documented.

Digital, emailed when your order ships: the work's story, the tradition it draws on and how it was made. 5 × 7 in (13 × 18 cm), ready to print and frame beside the work.

How it works →

Growing up, Emmanuel Abakah was given fairy tales that never included him. The mermaids in them always had straight hair and blue eyes. Black Mermaid is his answer, made, he says, for us: a girl with a full afro and a small gold crown, who rules the ocean.

Her eyes are still blue, but in his words they see beyond the world. The fish circling her aren't decoration either. They are drawn to her, protecting her and celebrating her at once. Emmanuel made it for every girl who has never seen herself as magical, as a princess or a mermaid, and its promise doesn't hedge. Nothing about her needs to change. Her Blackness is the magic.

Motifs in this work

The gold crown: this ocean is hers

The fish: protecting her and celebrating her

Blue eyes: eyes that see beyond the world

Edition: Edition of 20 in each size · 20 across all sizes. Further runs possible once a size sells out, each tagged (Run 2). Edition numbers count the works sold through Raknida; the artist may also sell their own editions of this work.
Numbering: Number, title and artist printed in the white border.
Printing: Museum-quality giclée with archival pigment inks on museum-grade cotton fine art paper.
Year: 2021
Includes: Your numbered artwork and its Cultural Passport.

Size	Sheet	Image	Museum-Quality Print only	Framed	Available
S	9 × 12 in	7½ × 9¾ in	$55	+$65	20

The artist

Emmanuel Abakah

Undeclared · Takoradi, Ghana · 3 works on Raknida

Emmanuel Abakah is a self-taught artist in Takoradi, Ghana. He started as a child with graphite pencils, teaching himself realistic drawing. He later carried that discipline into digital painting, where his drawings take on bold, saturated colour. His subject is the Black woman: her beauty, strength and identity. A woman with vitiligo at sunrise, a mermaid with an afro and a crown, a woman who wears Africa on her skin. He makes each portrait so that women see themselves as powerful, unique and worthy of celebration.

View full profile →All 3 works →