Afrafranto McNulty is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, mother, and maker whose creative practice has evolved over more than three decades.
Born and raised in Accra, Ghana, Afrafranto grew up surrounded by the visual language of West Africa—the color and geometry of cloth, pattern, symbol, storytelling, ceremony, markets, gardens, and the everyday collision of the sacred and ordinary.
Afrafranto means butterfly in Twi. The name holds both a connection to the place that formed her and an idea that runs throughout her work: transformation is rarely tidy. Things break apart, become something else, and sometimes grow wings.
Her work is also rooted in an Irish ancestral imagination of myth, land, women, saints, spirits, storytelling, and the thin places between the ordinary and unseen—stories and ways of seeing handed down from her grandmother to her mother, and from her mother to her. That matrilineal inheritance continues to surface in her work: old stories carried forward, altered by each generation and each new landscape.
Today, she lives and works in Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert—a landscape of monsoon skies, mountains, saguaros, medicinal plants, thorns, bones, blooms, heat, and astonishing resilience. Desert ecology and mythology have become another layer in a visual language formed across continents.
Her practice moves between painting, illustration, mixed media, assemblage, design, storytelling, and the transformation of ordinary objects into something meaningful. Pattern, botanical forms, animals, archetypes, religious imagery, domestic objects, textiles, humor, and myth recur throughout the work.
Across mediums, she returns to the same questions: How do we make a life after rupture? What do we carry forward? What deserves to be remembered, reclaimed, laughed at, grieved, or made beautiful?
Her work is deeply interested in motherhood and matriarchy, the body, cultural inheritance, grief, memory, belonging, resistance, and the stubborn human impulse to create beauty anyway.
Afrafranto Acres is both a studio and an evolving creative world: a place for original art, objects, words, teaching, gathering, and the ongoing practice of cultivating a good life.