My Ethiopia: Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof.

My Ethiopia

Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof

Christa Clarke

Neuberg Museum of Art, 2003.30 pp. Color illustrations; selected bibliography compiled by Patricia L. DiRubbo. $25.00 paper.

Ethiopian Passages

Contemporary Art from the Diaspora

Elizabeth Harney

London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2003, distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, NY. 128 pp. Color illustrations; photographs; plates; chronology; biographies; notes; suggested reading. $30.00 paper.

Historical manuscripts, panel paintings, and personal scrolls from Ethiopian churches and monasteries came to the attention of scholars and collectors in the early 1970s when Ethiopian objects first began to generate recognition and circulate as works of art in museums and private collections. These paintings, however, were not easily positioned among the common museum holdings of African art, which were comprised mostly of wooden and often highly abstracted three-dimensional masks and sculpture. Further, Ethiopia's unique position within the African continent as an ancient Christian empire lacking the shared history of colonial domination and the postcolonial conditions of its neighbors placed (and still places) Ethiopia as an "other" in relation to the body of work that has shaped what African art historians study. Ethiopian devotional images were couched in the historical genres of Coptic and medieval Christian traditions and, therefore, traditional Ethiopian art came to be largely excluded from African art discourse. With the exception of the exhibition and catalogue "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" (1999), which brought present-day male and female Ethiopian artists working primarily for local patrons to the attention of scholars (while also challenging the distinctions between fine art and handicraft, artist and craftsperson/carver, and secular and sacred arts), many of the tradition-based arts of Ethiopia go unnoticed today.

The situation plays itself out quite differently in the field of contemporary Ethiopian art, where Ethiopian artists exhibit with their Nigerian and South African counterparts and find voices in books like Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (1995), edited by Clementine Deliss, and The Hidden Reality: Three Contemporary Ethiopian Artists (1989), by Elizabeth Biaso. Two recent publications, Christa Clarke's My Ethiopia: Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof and Elizabeth Harney's Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora, bring Ethiopian contemporary artists working in the African Diaspora to our attention. They highlight their negotiations with issues of place and home, trace their inspirations (including the historic Ethiopian painting traditions), and reveal new and innovative approaches to African creativity.

The first book, My Ethiopia: Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof, features fourteen paintings from Wosene's first solo exhibition in the United States, which began at the Neuberger Museum of Art (2003) and continues at the Newark Museum (February-August 2004) and the University of Iowa Museum of Art (February 2005-August 2005). Christa Clarke, curator of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific at the Newark Museum, curated the exhibition and wrote this exhibition catalogue. The catalogue focuses on a painting series titled "The Color of Words," stimulated in part by Wosene's trip to Ethiopia in 1995 after eighteen years abroad. In these paintings, Wosene's signature Amharic script is combined with other elements that convey a sense of Christian Highland architecture, Ethiopian food, American jazz, African textiles, and the coffee culture in his hometown of Berkeley; California.

Some canvases are organized into horizontal grids while others are stacked together to create a paneled montage. Upon first glance, the paintings appear entirely abstract, each with black and white linear forms and a warm, vibrant red that appears to penetrate from the depth of the canvas. Yet, upon closer examination, there are symbols embedded in these fields of color, too: trees, hearts, faces, celestial bodies, and, to those literate in Amharic, shapes and words from the Semitic script. It is as though the written Amharic language, here mixed with other semiotic systems, becomes a mirror for the layered and amalgamated nature of oral language in exile. Clarke writes, "In his paintings, the calligraphic forms of Amharic are broken apart, abstracted, and reconfigured to create a new visual language that draws upon the artist's Ethiopian heritage while incorporating his experiences as an expatriate living in the United States," (p. 5). Clarke's accompanying narration is thoughtful and engaging, analyzing the works, the development of the written symbols, and Wosene's inspirations, including his Howard University thesis advisor, Jeff Donaldson, and the famous modernist Gebre Kristos Desta. Wosene is also one of the featured artists in Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora. The exhibition of the same title was held at the National Museum of African Art, May-October 2003.

Ethiopian Passages, written by Elizabeth Hamey, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Museum of African Art, features ten Ethiopian artists living in the Diaspora. Five of the ten artists, Kebedech Tekleab, Wosene Kosrof, Aida Muluneh, Elizabeth Habte Wold, and Elisabeth Atnafu, studied at Howard University with direction from Jeff Donaldson and another featured artist, Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian. Sadly, Skunder Boghossian, the first African artist to have work collected by the Museum of Modern Art, passed away a few days after the opening of the exhibition. Skunder is what Jeff Donaldson terms the quintessential "Trans-African" artist (p. 108). The other artists include Julie Mehretu, Etiye Dimma Poulsen, Michael Bethe-Selassie, and Achamyeleh Debela. The works themselves, reproduced in high-quality color images and exceptional in skill and execution, consist of painting, sculpture, mixed media collage, photography, and digital image print. The range of influences cited by the artists--Eugene Delacroix, Romare Bearden, Rwanda, Native American Powwows along with the more Ethiopian-derived images of amulets, architecture, and language--certainly illustrate the artists' transnational experiences.

Ethiopian Passages begins with a chronological recapitulation of select moments of Ethiopian history (from the mythical union of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon through the famine of 2002) interspersed with important dates in the history of Howard University's art department and its graduates. This is followed by an eloquent conversation about diaspora and displacement, an overview of key moments in Ethiopian history, a discussion of the artists and their work followed by artists' biographies and plates, and a brief overview of the historical and political relationship between Howard University and Ethiopia by Jeff Donaldson.

For those interested in the Ethiopian art scene, the concluding article by Achamyeleh Debela, "Then and Now: The Arts in Addis Ababa," is an excellent account of the history of the School of Fine Arts and Design from its inception in 1957 during the second reign of Haile Selassie to its present transformations under the new direction of Addis Ababa University. He also poignantly outlines the present contemporary art scene in Addis Ababa and its dire need for a dependable support network. Perhaps the most useful section for those interested in Diaspora studies is the unmediated dialogue between the curator, research associate Kinsey Katchka, Jeff Donaldson, professor of art Floyd Coleman, and professor of film studies Abiyi Ford.

As all of the chapters in Ethiopian Passages are self-contained, it is up to the reader to make connections between such varied topics as ideas of belonging, the role of Howard University students during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the current relationships between African Americans and Ethiopians living in the US. A concluding chapter that tried to knot some of these various topics together, or at least to define more clearly the relationship between artists, art production, and identify with respect to artists of Ethiopian descent educated in the US, those affiliated with the Fine Arts School, and African American artists who come from the Howard tradition would have been helpful.

For Ethiopianists, it is hard to overlook the use of the term "Abyssinian" when "Amhara" is intended (in a footnote that refers to the major ethnic groups in Ethiopia), the two spellings of a specific cultural group (Tigrean/Tigrayan) within the same article, and references to Africa's colonial experience in the introductory chapter without acknowledgment of Ethiopia's uniqueness precisely because it does not share a similar colonizing experience. Also, the preface states that Ethiopian artists will be referred to by their first name "when appropriate" to follow Ethiopian conventions. Since this rule is not followed with certain artists (Mehretu, Wold, Atnafu, Poulsen) or when both "Achamyeleh" and "Debela" are used in different places, a further discussion of naming and identity is warranted. Lastly, the unequal representation of Cushitic or Nilotic artists and their cultures cannot be dismissed. Certainly the vast majority of Ethiopian art school attendees both in Addis and in the US are from Semitic cultures. However, since self-taught artist Michael Bethe-Selassie is included in this book, one wonders if other self-taught artists living in exile might have been sought out to present a more holistic approach of the arts of Ethiopia and the Diaspora.

Overall, the attention given to artists in exile in these two books should be commended. They truly place Ethiopian artists working inside and outside of Ethiopia, male and female, traditional and contemporary, in a visible position within the field of African art history. In his own words, Wosene states:

   As an artist who worked to move traditions
   into contemporary art, I see myself
   definitely as a representative of contemporary
   art in Africa ... I also see myself
   as an individual, drawing on my culture,
   bringing my culture to the wider
   world ... I'm simply trying to examine
   and interpret my own emotional understandings,
   my feelings, and my spiritual
   journey, using the Amharic writing as
   a base (Clarke, p. 18).