The Sisi Kwa Sisi Collective was founded in 1983 amid turbulent political conditions following Kenya’s failed military coup in 1982. Etale Sukuro is a cofounder of the group, which was made up of 12 artists, including Kangara wa Njambi (b. 1957), Kabacia Gatu (b. 1951), Gakunju Kaigwa (b. 1958), Mwaniki wa Gachia, Zarina Patel (1935–2024), Kahare Miano, Gikonyo Maina, Mwaura Ndekere, and John Diang’a (b. 1945).¹ In this conversation, scholar and curator Donald Maingi traces Sukuro’s artistic journey—from his early collaboration with Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) through the failed campaigns to establish Kenya’s first national art gallery, to the open-air traveling exhibitions organized by Sisi Kwa Sisi.

Donald Maingi: Sukuro, can you tell us a little about your journey as an artist? What first inspired you to pursue art? Tell us about your upbringing, your personal experiences, and the influences that helped shape your art and your role in cofounding the Sisi Kwa Sisi Collective.

Etale Sukuro: I was born in 1954 and educated in Tanzania. I studied fine art up to A-level and went on to do literature at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1976, I came to Kenya, and I started teaching at St. Saviour High School in Nairobi and then moved on to Naromoru Girls High School in Murang’a, teaching literature and Swahili language. But in 1977, I moved back to Nairobi to join the late professor Wangari Maathai in her department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi and, also, to work with her at the National Council of Women of Kenya. She was the chairperson then.²

In the Veterinary department, I was a demonstrator and illustrator. And at the National Council of Women of Kenya, I was a contributor to their magazine Kenyan Women Today. I was also the illustrator for that magazine. In that same year, 1977, Professor Wangari Maathai (1940 – 2011) came up with the idea of the Green Belt Movement. I did the logo for the Green Belt Movement, which is still in use now. And I also did all the illustrations for social marketing for the Green Belt Movement. This inspired me to do my first solo exhibition in 1978 at the French Cultural Center. 

It was during this period that Professor Wangari Maathai was being hounded out of office and the Kenya National Council of Women was being dismantled by the government. The regime launched Maendeleo ya Wanawake to take over from the National Council of Women, which had been an umbrella for all women’s associations in Kenya. It was during those struggles that my resistance to the political regime grew more and more.

At the same time, the University of Nairobi was doing, for the first time, a traveling theater around Kenya, and it was also banned by that regime. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) had done some plays, and they were also facing problems with the government.³ In 1979, there was a suggestion to establish the first national art gallery. We had not, up to then, had a national art gallery. We have had several galleries that have come up and tried to help where there was a gap. During that time, I was the chairman of the Central Art Clubs of Kenya, and I was part of the committee to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery. 

DM: Could you walk us through the founding of Sisi Kwa Sisi? How did you first meet as a group of artists—among them Kangara wa Njambi, Kabacia Gatu, Gakunju Kaigwa, Mwaniki wa Gachia, Zarina Patel, Kahare Miano, Gikonyo Maina, Mwaura Ndekere, and John Diang’a? What united you? What was your initial vision for the collective in contributing to the formation of a national art gallery? And how did the name Sisi Kwa Sisi emerge within that context?

ES: Let me just start with Sisi Kwa Sisi. It is a Swahili phrase that can mean “us by us” or “us for us.” “Us by us” means artist by artist, [that is,] Kenyan artist by Kenyan artists. “Us for us” means Kenyan art is for Kenyan people.

Back in 1979, the Kenyan government allocated money for the first time to renovate a former commercial bank building into an international art gallery. We—as artists’ associations, including Kenya Arts Designers and the Arts Club of Kenya, of which I was chairman—were contacted and asked to curate the exhibition that would inaugurate that building as a national art gallery. We went around the country as a committee and collected over 3,000 pieces from Kenyan artists, [so that we would be] ready to put them up once the renovation was finished.

We had a lot of problems with some people in the government in selecting the kind of work that could be shown. As we went on, we realized that most of the important works were going to be left out. But the worst thing that happened is that one government official came to tell the committee: “This exhibition is not going to be for Kenyan artists only. It is going to be with the Murumbi collection.”⁴ Murumbi was one of Kenya’s first vice presidents after independence—a staunch collector of artifacts from all over Africa. His artifacts were supposed to share the inaugural exhibition with our work. We discussed [this] as a committee and realized if we refused, we would be thrown out altogether and the national art gallery would not even start. So we agreed.

That was just the beginning of more problems, because the same officials came back and told us the inaugural exhibition would be the Murumbi collection alone. This was not acceptable. When I saw this misfortune happen, I went to the Department of Culture—which had been formed that same year, in 1979—and saw the minister, who directed me to the director of culture James Kangwana. Kangwana was one of the founders of Paa ya Paa, the famous gallery in Kenya. He agreed with me that there was a need for a national art gallery and told me that since this would now require political will from the highest office in the land, we needed to produce artworks that the president himself would officially unveil. These works would then be taken to the provinces—at that time we had eight provinces, not counties—and through that, we could ask the government for space to house the collection.

So Kangwana asked me to go and do research in all eight provinces and depict the traditional architecture of one nationality from each province. I did eight large paintings (fig.1)—48 inches by 16 feet each—which were to be taken to the provinces after the president saw them. The exhibition, called Utamaduni wa Sanaa (The Traditions of Art), went up in 1981 at City Hall in Nairobi. It was a major exhibition. Unfortunately, the traveling component never happened. And those eight paintings were never sent to the provinces. As I speak, I know a number of them were given away to Chinese officials who came to build the national stadium in Kenya. The others . . . I don’t know where they are.

Our second chance to create a center for Kenyan art died in 1981. The artists on that committee—some of whom had also been part of the first attempt at the National Archives building—sat together. One of the key members was Kangara wa Njambi. Some members of the Utamaduni wa Sanaa (The Traditions of Art) committee—Kabacia Gatu, myself, and others—decided to take some of the works that had been exhibited and add more, and then to take them on a traveling exhibition.⁵ This traveling exhibition was informed by what had happened with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want)—and the events surrounding the University of Nairobi’s traveling theater. There were many other factors that had inspired us to sit down and decide that we had to take our art to our people. And our content had to address Kenyan people. We were no longer going to do what had been done in previous years—when, basically, most Kenyan artists produced souvenirs for tourists. That’s what happened for many years. So we started Sisi Kwa Sisi.

DM: The art world in the 1980s was really a very busy environment. We had ex-Mau Mau artists coming up—like Samwel Wanjau (1936–2020), a rural ex-Mau Mau freedom fighter, and Edward Njenga (1922–2022), an urban ex-Mau Mau freedom fighter.⁶ What was your relationship with these artists? At the time, ex-Mau Mau freedom fighters were really vilified politically, and yet here they were, making art, just as Sisi Kwa Sisi was also springing up.

ES: Samwel Wanjau and Edward Njenga are my seniors. What was very interesting—what intrigues us—is the fact that they could express the politics before and after independence in Kenya, mainly the oppressive politics, through sculpture, which is very difficult. More interesting is the fact that expressing this through sculpture was interpreted as less threatening by the regime than paintings, which are more illustrative.

When you look at Edward Njenga’s work (fig. 3) and Samwel Wanjau’s work (figs. 2, 4), it is very clear and obvious that they were not doing these works in order to sell them. A number of [their subjects] look very sad, very violent. They were clearly producing this work to express the political, social, and economic situation in the country. And they inspired us—all the more so for the fact that by using that medium, sculpture, they could express so much. We realized what they had done—and that we should pick it up from there and put it in our own work. And this is the work that would then resonate with Kenyan people and be understood by them in terms of its context.

DM: What would you say really shaped Sisi Kwa Sisi at its early stages? Artists like Kangara wa Njambi, Zarina Patel—how did their practices fit into the collective’s early vision?

ES: Right from the outset, when we decided we were going to do work as Sisi Kwa Sisi, it actually meant doing different work from what had always been done—pieces geared toward pleasing expatriates, tourists, and some rich Kenyans. We decided that our work—us, Sisi—was going to be addressed to Kenyan people, squarely addressing the issues going on in Kenya in the past, present, and probably the future.

The oppression that was going on was not anything new—it had been going on [for a long time], and it was getting worse by the day. So we decided to tackle the disappearance of Kenyan culture. We decided to tackle neocolonialism and imperialism. If you look at a number of works, you’ll see two of the major issues depicted are food security and safety. And another is oppression. There was complete suppression of freedom of speech during the regime at that time. In fact, one had to be very careful when about to say anything—even just mentioning the name of the president. You had to look left, right, front, and back. Who is around? Just in case you might be picked up like anybody else. So in doing this kind of work, we knew the dangers.

But one fact was on our side: the level of education—or exposure—of politicians in relation to art was very low. They took it that art is just for pleasure. They couldn’t conceive that art could be a tool for education or a tool for the communication of ideology. So to that extent, we had freedom. We were able to express ourselves.

At that very same time, cartoonists—including Terry Hirst (1932–2015) and Paul Kelemba otherwise known as Maddo (b. 1962)—were coming up with artworks that questioned the regime. Our friend the late Wahome Mutahi (1954–2003) was a writer, playwright, and columnist for the Daily Nation newspaper. He, together with my friend Paul Kelemba—going by the name Maddo, one of the most famous cartoonists in Kenya—worked to depict the same oppressive behavior of the regime in a humorous way, and they went as far as setting up a traveling theater for one of Wahome Mutahi’s plays. It was also banned. Having both visual and performing artists continuously agitating for freedom of speech, questioning the bad behavior of the regime, the oppression, the killings . . . We decided that since our work was not for sale in the first place, we might as well make it serve an educational purpose.

DM: What was the relationship between Nairobi street sign painting and the early stages of Sisi Kwa Sisi? You’ve written about the history of sign painting as a practice within Kenya since the 1930s. What was the impact of that visual culture on these young artists who established their practices in the early 1980s?

ES: Unfortunately, a lot of murals done by these artists in bars, hotels, churches, and marketplaces have been whitewashed (fig. 5).⁷ But if you look at some of our work—when I say our, I mean Sisi Kwa Sisi’s work—you’ll see that it is illustrative. It could be more graphic at times, but it is illustrative (figs. 6–11). Sign painting is one of the art forms that truly reached Kenyan people more than any other throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.⁸ [That was] because these artists did more or less social-marketing work: signage, illustrative paintings, murals in bars and public places, comical at times to make their work more interesting to their patrons.

They inspired us in a way that made us realize that if they have done this for all this long, then we could take our art to Kenyan people—starting with portable works and eventually doing prints. We could take our work to places where a lot of people come—not because they are coming to see an exhibition, not like in galleries, but because they are coming to do something else. And while there, they are able to view these art pieces. That is exactly where our traveling art exhibitions picked up their inspiration.

DM: What was the public perception of the open-air exhibitions? What impact did they have on people who had never visited an art gallery? And how did that help shape the Sisi Kwa Sisi workshops and art promotions?

ES: When the second attempt to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery through the Department of Culture failed, and the traveling exhibition from the Utamaduni Asani exhibition was shelved, we had already built exhibition panels. I had initiated that at the Department of Culture. I borrowed them from the department, and with our friends, we decided to take them to the biggest marketplaces in Nairobi (fig. 12), to the slums of Nairobi, to the streets of Nairobi.

We decided we had to document the sentiment—the feeling and the feedback from those who came to see our works. A young man was stationed to write down responses. They wrote a lot. I have volumes upon volumes of comments (fig. 13). One of the most remarkable—which really moved me—came from a young child from a school in one of the biggest slums. They wrote: “I did not know we had such people who can draw such pictures in our country.” I just couldn’t believe it. And some of them were saying, “We only thought this would be in our textbooks, not being displayed for us.”

We had some sessions from around nine in the morning until six in the evening, and we would have 20,000 people or more—we couldn’t count. Why? Because they were passing by or they were in the market. Women would go on with their business as usual, but whoever was coming by was going to see what we were displaying (fig. 14). The initial work we displayed had mild political content—because, number one, the panels would have been taken away from us immediately, and number two, that would have meant the end of our traveling exhibition. So we were introducing the content of our political dissent slowly.

What we learned from this exhibition is that it was really high time—counting from independence, it had been, God knows, forty or fifty years—that Kenyans had no place, no way, to go and see Kenyan artwork produced by Kenyan artists. We realized we could go on with this, but it was quite daunting for us financially. We had to hire vehicles to carry these panels. Some broke in strong winds, and we had to pay the Department of Culture for replacements.

Amazingly, some of the comments we got were, “How can I get one of these pictures to hang in my place?” We realized that if we were selling our original work at the price equivalent to somebody’s half salary, we had to do something different to be able to sell copies at 100 shillings—less than a dollar. We realized the only way to do this was to make prints. So we set up a printing workshop in my studio (fig. 15). We trained more artists in screen printing, etching, and so forth. When we went to the open-air traveling exhibitions, we would have works that were affordable to the people coming—and we would have variety. Because it is very important that in any of those day-to-day exhibitions [in which] you found us—four or five of us, or sometimes I was alone—if we had many other artists and different styles, there were better chances that we could sell these works and finance our traveling exhibitions.

DM: What could you say was the legacy of open-air art exhibitions in shaping and redefining Kenyan contemporary art in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s? What was the impact as Sisi Kwa Sisi evolved and as the struggle for multiparty democracy was intensified?

ES: The two failed attempts to establish the Kenya National Art Gallery—one at the former KCB [Kenya Commercial Bank] building and one through the Department of Culture—made it obvious we could not go on with the traveling art exhibition indefinitely; it was expensive and the Department of Culture, after seeing some of the content of our work, took away the panels. So we could no longer exhibit in the same way.

It was at that moment that another idea came to me. What if—since everything has a price in this country—what if I turned the whole thing of taking art to the people, the same way as the bar muralists were doing, and still be able to pass on messages and influence Kenyan people through art? So I started Sanaa Art Promotions specifically to do social marketing.⁹ I got NGOs to fund some of our work. We were doing traveling theater. We were doing murals all over the country (figs. 16–17). At one time, we had 120 muralists employed by Sanaa Art Promotion. In total, by 2006, we had 288 artists working with us.

What did we do? If you look at the murals—some saying, “Your vote is your right”—these are the kinds of works we were doing in marketplaces and schools. We were holding meetings and small reenactments of what we were going to put on the mural in public places. So we had theater and visual arts going together to address different issues in society.

These artists went on to be teachers and influencers in this country as far as art is concerned. We have thousands of murals in this country inspired by Sanaa Art Promotion. Many artists have formed other groups using the same model. I believe the Kenya National Art Gallery is evolving through this kind of work. And as more Kenyan people are exposed to Kenyan artists’ work, they will demand the spaces and forums needed to have these works developed, conserved, and still displayed to the majority of Kenyans.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in March 2025. The 2025 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

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The Ford Foundation declined the grant. But beyond its paternalism and its questionable assumptions about African art, Rubin’s letter reveals something more consequential. The phrase “airport art” was not Rubin’s invention; it was McEwen’s term, and one he had been actively cultivating through the 1960s as both a warning and a sales strategy—a way to stake the Workshop School, his own in-house training program and production, against a looming tourist market.² Rubin learned the label from McEwen, and he deployed it here exactly as intended: to rule that this work was not that. In doing so, Rubin did more than offer aesthetic approval. He effectively ratified the very distinction McEwen had been working to enforce in order to promote the output of his Rhodesian Workshop School.

That distinction soon became certified by Western institutions. In 1968, sculptures from McEwen’s workshop began their world tour when they were shipped to New York; classified at customs “for exhibition purposes”; and insured, warehoused, and circulated by MoMA for two years across American universities and museums under the title New African Art: The Central African Workshop School. They were exhibited—and they were sold by MoMA. Within a few years, Zimbabwean stone sculpture, often labeled “Shona sculpture,” had become one of the most visible and commercially successful contemporary art movement from the African continent in Europe and the United States.³

This essay argues that the difference between what came to be known as “airport art” and “Shona sculpture” was neither simply rhetorical nor aesthetic. It was a matter of infrastructural control. In Salisbury (now Harare), production, pricing, exhibition, and sales were initially concentrated in a single institutional hub—the National Gallery and its Workshop School. When that hub was extended through MoMA’s circulating exhibitions apparatus, the circuit widened without becoming decentralized. In this system, authenticity was not the opposite of hybridity; it was the language that secured it. Together, these terms stabilized both aesthetic and financial value across the full chain of making, circulation, and display.

The Salisbury Hub: Concentrating Production, Distribution, and Display

Rubin repeats McEwen’s phrase as if it were already common sense. That is exactly the point. By the mid-1960s, “airport art” had moved from Salisbury into international discourse, in many ways thanks to Frank McEwen’s efforts. In his writings on the National Gallery of Salisbury and its Workshop School, McEwen began defining a foil against which his project could take shape. By the time of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, the phrase had entered a broader discourse.⁴ What began as polemic was becoming a shared diagnostic for the state of contemporary African culture.⁵

McEwen’s own definition was deliberately provocative. “Tourist art trade,” he wrote, is governed by “a base commercialization [that] controls the mass production of thousands of shiny wooden pseudo-African images. Lathes, calipers, sanders, polishers help exploit this form of art prostitution that tourists support.”⁶ The rhetoric was accompanied by photographs: sculptures cramped together on small tables, lined up in repetitive rows, and thereby stripped of aura and individuality (figs. 2, 3). The imagery did as much work as the words. Airport art was congestion, mechanical repetition, excess supply.

For McEwen, the problem was not just that artists were “heavily exploited” by middlemen, the deeper danger was epistemic.⁷ Tourist demand, he argued, had begun to dictate supply and corrupt vision. Airport art described an entire infrastructure that allowed the market to speak too directly.

McEwen’s key move in 1963 was that he framed the Workshop School less as a romantic enclave and more as a local counter-infrastructure “to develop a whole cycle of effective art production and protection.”⁸ This cycle involved gatekeeping talent, standardizing materials, reinforcing the pedagogical myth of non-teaching, creating “an international market . . . on itinerant exhibitions,” and having a strict “sales policy.”⁹ Crucially, McEwen was not trying to eliminate the market; rather, he was trying to own the market interface (selection, narrative, and placement) so that tourist demand could not directly sculpt form and category. Under McEwen’s tutelage, production, exhibition, pricing, and distribution were brought under one institutional roof, functioning simultaneously as studio complex, exhibition venue, marketing apparatus, and gatekeeper.

Artists were initially invited to work in proximity to the museum or on its premises, but they were not independent entrepreneurs. The National Gallery took a percentage of sales—initially around 50 percent—and retained authority over pricing and selection.¹⁰ Those who did not meet the aesthetic and commercial expectations would lose access to studio space.¹¹ Whatever its self-proclaimed laissez-faire pedagogy of “teachers who do not teach,” the system was tightly managed.

The crucial difference between airport art and what McEwen promoted as Zimbabwean “Shona sculpture” thus lay in the control of commerce. In McEwen’s National Gallery, production was centralized, exhibition carefully staged, pricing disciplined, and distribution mediated through a single hub. Tourist demand could not directly address the artist, now shielded in “quarry-factories” like Vukutu hundreds of miles away from the site of display (fig. 4). The National Gallery did not reject the market, it filtered it.

MoMA as Transnational Extension

If Salisbury concentrated production, pricing, and exhibition under one roof, MoMA scaled that structure when the sculptures arrived in New York. Indeed, the Museum translated McEwen’s hub into an institutional system of customs classification, valuation, touring logistics, and controlled sales.

In February 1968, six crates weighing more than 3,100 pounds arrived in the United States. As one internal memo to Rubin put it, “[McEwen] has had over 300 sculptures shipped here from Rhodesia, mainly to get them out of the country.”¹² In fact, timing mattered: The shipment arrived just months before Rhodesian exports faced an intensified embargo due to its apartheid regime.¹³ To enable the import, MoMA’s staff did more than process paperwork. Through letters from Waldo Rasmussen (Director of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions) and William Rubin, the works were imported under tariff item number 765.2000 and 765.0300, allowing the Museum to pay as little as $55 import duty on freight that it had insured for over $50,000.

The reason for the tariff exemption is twofold: For one, Rasmussen made clear in his letter to the customs officials that the shipment was only for “for exhibition purposes.”¹⁴ On paper, they were loans. In practice, however, they were also inventory for sale. On the other hand, William Rubin’s letter to the customs officials added, somewhat laconically, “These [sculptures] are serious, and in most cases, very good works of art which should not be in the least confused with ‘ethnic’ craft objects of the type sometimes produced outside the centers of Western art.”¹⁵ Customs, in other words, did not merely facilitate border crossing, it contributed to the sharpening of aesthetic policing. The import process became a site where “serious art” was administratively distinguished from its contemporary others—whether labeled “ethnic” craft or dismissed as “airport art.”

From customs, the exhibition entered MoMA’s Circulating Exhibitions apparatus, where Rasmussen’s department created the tour package: a title, a brochure, press material, and sales documentation.¹⁶ The title—New African Art: The Central African Workshop School—was itself a strategic distortion. It redirected attention away from Southern Africa and Rhodesia, names increasingly associated in the US media with the violence of white minority rule, and toward a safer, generalized geography of “new” and “Central African.”

The brochure text had a double function here, producing individuality and collectivity at once. For one, it individuated the sculptors: Each artist is named (alphabetically), with a birth year and a place of work, alongside title and medium. These biographical coordinates establish them as authors in contrast to their “airport art” competitors. On another, the same brochure folds those authors back into a collective identity. McEwen’s heavily shortened text supplies a developmental narrative that converts these artists into a single “school.” They are cast as “deeply immersed” in folklore, ritual, and “magic” then mapped in a staged progression—from “adult-child art,” through “heavy primitivism” and a “pre-Columbian” phase, “before achieving personal sophistication.”¹⁷ Strongly reminiscent of narratives around Pablo Picasso’s creation of Cubism, the result is a familiar modernist story of maturation and refinement, one that renders stylistic change legible as individual aesthetic progress—while making “the Workshop School” appear as the shared engine behind the individual authors.

The brochure also standardizes formal looking, making sure that viewers will notice the same sculpture’s features. It identifies recurring elements—enlarged heads, frontal poses, vertical emphasis, “relaxed tension,” and integrated bases—while treating variation as local content (“spirit images”) within a shared visual grammar.¹⁸ The point was not only to describe the sculptures, but also to stabilize what would count as their defining qualities as the objects moved from venue to venue.

Where text and image reinforced that stabilization, pricing gave it teeth. The brochure circulated alongside a price list and other sales materials for prospective buyers (fig. 5), and the price schedule tracks the implicit hierarchy more closely than it does medium or scale. Most works cluster around roughly $350, suggesting a baseline “serious sculpture” price, while the upper tier appears reserved for artists positioned as more “advanced.”

Joram Mariga’s Universal Spirit (n.d.) sits at the top of the list at $811, consistent with his status in the literature as an early catalyst for stone carving.¹⁹ Next come Bernard Manyandure’s Traditional Dancing (n.d.), one of the largest works in the exhibition, and Vaisi (Vais) Chimange’s Frog-man Spirit (n.d.), both priced at $679 (fig. 6). Chimange is especially instructive: Born in Mozambique, only 24, and a recent entrant to stone carving, he complicated any simple equation of “sophistication” with age and made “Shona” a shaky explanatory anchor for the categories being built around the work. At the low end, Kitela’s Head ($275; fig. 7)—a medium-size brown steatite sculpture not dramatically smaller than Chimange’s and carved in the same material. Embodying neither the vertical emphasis nor relaxed tension, its price suggests that quality was assessed according to ranked authorship and McEwen’s formal criteria more than medium or dimensions.

Photographs for prospective buyers staged the works outdoors—including images implying MoMA’s sculpture garden, even though they were never exhibited there as if to suggest to install it outside after acquisition (fig. 8).²⁰ Similarly, the cover of the brochure depicts the sculptures placed on tree trunks, highlighting verticality in a setting that would have read to many viewers like it read to Rubin, namely as “the bush” (fig. 9). These choices did quiet work: They suggested origin, authenticity, and installability at the same time, while keeping the objects visually distinct from more commercial environments.

The exhibition traveled to eight venues across the United States, typically staying three to four weeks at each stop. University galleries and museums paid fees scaled to institutional status between $100 and $500 in addition to covering the shipping fees. Pedestals were fabricated. Sculptures were drilled for stability. Condition reports tracked chips and cracks; repairs were ordered; damage was evaluated against insured value. This was not incidental administration. It was the material infrastructure that allowed the works to circulate as “serious sculpture” within a curated circuit.

Throughout the tour, the works remained available for purchase. MoMA took a 10 percent commission on sales, with an additional $30 markup on objects requiring plinths.²¹ Administratively, the objects could be filed as loans. Functionally, they operated as managed inventory: curated, toured, and sold through institutional mediation. Demand did not speak directly to the sculptor but with the Department of Circulating Exhibitions; it was filtered through a system designed to buffer the feedback loops McEwen feared. The central hub in Salisbury was geographically displaced but structurally preserved.

In this mediation, MoMA assumed multiple roles simultaneously: It was customs broker, classifying the works to ensure favorable entry. It was insurer, establishing and revising monetary value. It was warehouse manager, responsible for storage and handling. It was touring coordinator, structuring the itinerary and institutional framing. It was commissioned seller. And above all, it was validator.

Press responses suggest the system worked as intended. Reviews repeatedly echoed the brochure’s language and interpretive frame: formal traits (enlarged head, verticality, “relaxed tension”) and claims of cultural isolation, folklore, and “ancient” heritage.²² In one instance, a local art history department chair even went on the record, lending his institutional authority to repeat the brochure almost verbatim.²³ Meaning traveled as reliably as the crates did.

Hybridity, Formal Coherence, and the Historiography of Stone Sculpture

Across the primary and secondary literature, stone sculpture is typically organized through two overlapping sets of divisions: institutional centers and origin stories. On the one hand, survey accounts map the movement onto parallel, if not competing, hubs—most commonly McEwen’s National Gallery/Workshop School lineage and the Tengenenge farm under Tom Blomefield. On the other hand, revisionist histories redivide the field genealogically: Instead of an ex nihilo “Shona” flowering, they trace stone carving to earlier mission-based pedagogies (Cyrene and Serima) and then to a dispersed first generation whose biographies cluster by region (Cyrene, Serima, Harare, Nyanga, Tengenenge).²⁴

My argument sits adjacent to (and slightly orthogonal to) the standard poles of the debate. Jonathan Leslie Zilberg’s influential formulation treats “Shona sculpture” as an engineered tradition, one shaped by McEwen’s intellectual templates and by intercultural traffic rather than ethnic continuity.²⁵ Later work complicates that account by reasserting artists’ agency and the thick reality of belief and training—whether through interview-based cultural contextualization and patronage analysis (Celia Winter-Irving and Elizabeth A. Morton), anthropological emphasis on identity-making and customary continuities (Joseph James Kinsella), or revisionist re-centering of African artist-teachers and system-level causality (Barnabas Muvhuti).²⁶ I add to this conversation a third term: “circulatory infrastructure as a generator of form.” Rather than adjudicating whether aesthetic form originates in indigenous “spirit” or modernist “invention,” I treat form as the repeatable outcome of touring, insurance, photography, installation standardization, and market buffering. What looks like “style” is also a set of solutions to photography, packing, customs, insurance, reinstallation, and sale—an aesthetic that crystallized under the economic discipline of circulation.

The features most frequently highlighted by McEwen and the press make this clear. Frontality is not only a compositional preference, it is also is a media strategy. A frontal figure reproduces cleanly in brochures and newspapers and remains legible at a glance—especially when reduced to black-and-white halftone. The claim that the stand is built into the sculpture similarly functions as both ontology and logistics: It renders the work self-sufficient while making it easy to install, reinstall, and stabilize across changing venues. Scale performs as portable monumentality—large enough to command a pedestal, compact enough to fit predictable crate dimensions and touring schedules. Material decisions—shifts toward harder serpentine and granite—also read differently when paired with documentation: Durability reduces loss and repair; the rarity of hard stone supports “anti-fake” branding; and a stable material profile simplifies valuation and insurance. McEwen’s much-emphasized polished surfaces became an interface between form and paperwork: Finish registers as quality in photographs and can be described, compared, and verified in condition reports. Verticality, often treated as purely expressive, can be understood as another touring form. Upright figures maximize presence while minimizing footprint: They store efficiently, stabilize easily on pedestals, and hold a crisp silhouette under varied lighting conditions.

The installation photograph from the West Virginia University Gallery iteration makes the infrastructural logic visible (fig. 10). The works are dispersed across pedestals and a curved platform, each isolated by dramatic lighting into a discrete, readable unit. Nothing relies on a complex environment or contextual explanation; each object is made to “hold” its own display conditions—self-supporting, immediately legible, and resistant to visual noise. Even the museum’s standardized tools (track lights, plinths, open sight lines) seem anticipated by the sculptures’ compact massing and restrained protrusions.

Seen as a whole, the story is less about stylistic evolution than it is about a value chain that continuously converts risk into form and form into value. McEwen’s Salisbury hub concentrated production, selection, pricing, and narrative; MoMA extended that hub transnationally by translating “seriousness” into customs categories, insurance schedules, touring contracts, installations, commission-based sales, and the press. “Shona sculpture” operated as a circuit in which authenticity rhetoric and modernist legibility worked together to make circulation profitable without appearing commercial. Once the chain was visible end to end, formal traits stopped reading as timeless cultural signatures and began to register as logistical achievements: frontality that photographs, integrated bases that reinstall, vertical silhouettes that pedestal and pack, hard stone and polish that insure and reproduce. This is not to cast Zimbabwean sculptors as passive outputs of a system, but to mark the conditions within which they made decisions—navigating, negotiating, and at times exploiting the constraints and opportunities of touring, documentation, and sale—as part of their artistic practice. As Bernard Takawira, who was only 20 years old at the time of the exhibition and would later become one of its most internationally successful participants, put it: “Sculpting is not a train station: It is the journey itself.”²⁷ Modern art here is not a look so much as a route—made in and through the conditions of circulation.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for Figures 2 and 3 in this article. If you hold the rights to any of the material used and have not been contacted, please reach out to contact_c-map@moma.org so that proper credit can be attributed or the material removed.

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Morocco’s first fine arts school, L’Institut national des beaux-arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts; hereafter INBA), is located in Tetouan—a city in the northern region known as the Rif (fig. 1). The school was founded in 1946 by the Spanish colonial government as La Escuela preparatoria de bellas artes (The Preparatory School of Fine Arts; hereafter EPBA) and served as part of military dictator Francisco Franco’s mission to formulate a more positive image abroad after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).¹ While fine arts courses were offered in primary schools during the French and Spanish protectorate era (1912–56), the EPBA, led by the Spanish painter Mariano Bertuchi Nieto (1884–1955), was the first of its kind to provide Moroccans with the opportunity to extensively study fine arts, obtain scholarships to study abroad, and envision a career as an artist or fine arts instructor (fig. 2).² To this day, Bertuchi is recognized by many Tetouanis as the “Spiritual Father” of “La Escuela Pictórica de Tetuán” (The Pictorial School of Tetouan) or “La Escuela de Tetuán” (The Tetouan School)—labels coined by Spanish art critics Carlos Antonio Areán González and Dora Bacaïcoa on the occasion of a group exhibition of Tetouani artists at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1967.³

In the 1950s, the best Moroccan students having completed their studies at the EPBA were awarded scholarships by the Spanish government to continue their education at institutions such as Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando or Seville’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Isabel of Hungary.⁴ As in most of the formerly colonized world, the first group of artists studying in Europe—equipped with fine arts as a tool for building a “modern civilization”—returned home to their newly independent country to spearhead a “cultural renaissance.”⁵ In Spain, Franco maintained a conservative environment and retrograde cultural agenda throughout his dictatorial reign (1939–75).⁶ In higher education, he eliminated “decadent” influences, foreign emulation, Russophilia, effeminacy, and the dehumanization of art and literature, instead looking to Spain’s Golden Age, or the neoclassical eras of the 16th through 18th centuries, as models for the artistic values he encouraged.⁷ As a result, the environment in which Tetouan’s modern painters studied was a restrictive one in that all personal freedom of thinking and imagination had been eliminated.⁸ According to scholar Fernando Labrada Martín, individual creative pursuits were undertaken only after students had developed a sound academic foundation at one of the Spanish art academies.⁹ In addition to cultural conservatism, Franco promoted education in “practical and utilitarian fields” to prepare students for nation-building. As a result, Moroccan students also obtained teaching degrees and were, for the first time, equipped to professionalize themselves as instructors of fine arts.¹⁰

While the INBA’s contemporary artists have gained attention in the art market and the international exhibition circuit, the school’s modern period, which I designate as the 1950s through the 1970s, remains largely an enigma. Contemporary artists from Tetouan are therefore presented as if emerging from a void.¹¹ The Francophone hegemony of Morocco’s cultural discourse has centered Casablanca’s modern artists, while Tetouan’s cultural scene has been superficially discussed, sidelined, or absent altogether.¹² Artists such as Ahmed Amrani (b. 1942), Saâd Ben Cheffaj (b. 1939), and Meki Megara (1933–2009) not only trained at the colonial-era EPBA, but they also became instructors at the ENBA in the postindependence period. Mohamed Sarghini (1923–1991) would bypass the preparatory school to become the first Moroccan to enroll at a European art academy. He then returned to Tetouan to serve as the school’s first Moroccan director. Meriem Meziane (1930–2009) would also bypass the EPBA and become the first Moroccan woman to enroll at an art academy abroad. Though she never taught or studied at the Tetouan art school, her trailblazing career as a woman artist is important to Tetouan’s art history.¹³ Their work, among that of many others, shows that Moroccan modern art is multifaceted—both within a Tetouani context and on a national scale. In their personal practices, they experimented with a diversity of formal styles, thereby breaking away from the conservatism for which the Tetouan art school was known.

After Morocco’s independence in 1956, Spanish instructors and students gradually departed the school, and Sarghini began his tenure as director—a post he held until 1986. To consolidate the institution into the larger national project, King Mohammed V re-inaugurated the EPBA as L’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts (The National School of Fine Arts; hereafter ENBA) in 1957 (fig. 3). The immediate postindependence period has been described as a time of “Moroccanization” or “valorization of Moroccan identity,” with the end goal of creating a “purely” Moroccan school through the appointment of a Moroccan director and enrollment of a Moroccan student body.¹⁴ Unlike at Casablanca’s art school, where Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) became director in 1962 and led his peers through a pedagogical overhaul, the ENBA maintained an approach to fine arts inherited from Spain. I argue that there are many reasons for the ENBA’s slow shift away from the metropole of Madrid. Tetouan, and the greater Rif region, was disenfranchised by the central Moroccan government in the years immediately after independence—leaving it politically, socially, and culturally disconnected. One response to this subjugation is the Rif Revolts of 1958, which shaped the conditions under which the institution evolved.¹⁵

Despite this turmoil, the decades following independence in Morocco were a time of openness and study in search of emancipation due to the atmosphere of cultural and patriotic movement.¹⁶ It was a moment of renewed energy and creativity, with debates over authenticity playing a central role in artistic circles. Bouabid Bouzaid (b. 1953), an alumnus of the art school and later an instructor there, wrote that this was a difficult stage in the country’s history as many first- and second-generation artists were preoccupied with the question of originality, how to define modernity, and the search for identity.¹⁷

Art historian María Dolores Jimenéz Valiente wrote that after independence, the ENBA maintained Bertuchi’s pedagogical model, albeit with slight modifications including an increase in courses, workshops, and teaching hours.¹⁸ From the 1960s onward, course load and study hours increased from 16 to 45 hours per week.¹⁹ Students completed preparatory coursework across drawing, anatomy, art history, decorative arts, and perspective before choosing a specialty in their second or third year.²⁰ The most significant change, perhaps as part of the king’s nationalization project, was that the school was now recognized at the secondary education level, thereby affording students the opportunity to receive a diploma at the end of their three-year study. 

In Casablanca, Belkahia and his peers believed that arts education in Morocco at the onset of independence was deficient, incompatible with the needs of Moroccans, and shaped by imported, outdated colonial models. Indeed, they referred to it as “backward” and “bastardized.”²¹ Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) lamented that colonialism had “corrupted” Moroccan society’s taste, while Jilali Gharbaoui (1930–1971) believed that Moroccan arts education was “incomplete” and failed to teach students “how to see.”²² The artists associated with Casablanca’s art school had a very different experience from those in Tetouan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the former led a pedagogical overhaul, moving away from fine arts teachings inherited from Europe and toward a greater exposure to local Moroccan arts and crafts, particularly the visual culture of the Imazighen, in order to form an inherently Moroccan visual culture.²³

Although the ENBA’s pedagogy remained unchanged, its first generation of artists was equally preoccupied with formal innovation and a quest for a Moroccan identity in their individual artistic practices. In the colonial period, emphasis on Orientalist subject matter or stereotypical scenes of daily life depicting an unchanged, timeless Morocco akin to Spain’s Andalusian past were used as mythmaking and propaganda to justify Spain’s presence in northern Morocco.²⁴ By the postindependence period, it can be argued that Sarghini, Meziane, Megara, Ben Cheffaj, and Amrani continued painting scenes of local people, heritage, folklore, and landscapes as a strategy in their search for national identity. They drew from a multitude of formal approaches and image traditions, including Islamic calligraphy, ancient mythology, cosmology, abstraction, and figuration, as well as from Cubism and Expressionism. They synthesized their local culture with forms inherited from multiple sources, thereby affirming Tetouanis as artists in a modern, connected world. For the sake of space, this essay will highlight several examples, but it is in no way intended to be an exhaustive review of all the artists associated with the institution and the city’s artistic scene. 

As the ENBA’s first Moroccan director, Sarghini is a central figure in Tetouan’s modern art history (fig. 4). Despite his role as an administrator and upholder of colonial-era fine arts pedagogy, he was experimenting with radically new forms to represent his culture and identity. In his 1958 Cortège de mariée (Bridal Procession), for example, he depicted a wedding procession through a natural landscape (fig. 5). Sarghini has reduced figures, animals, and objects to geometric forms—to triangles, rhombi, ovals—straying from academic realism and instead utilizing a daring formal approach. His subjects appear to chaotically merge with the tranquil background. Ultimately, Sarghini’s Cortège de mariée borrows the compositional structure and subject matter of Orientalist paintings only to deconstruct them. 

This geometric rendering can also be found in L’homme et son univers (Man and His Universe), an existential painting created just one year after Morocco declared its independence (fig. 6). At the center of the composition, a man stands alone, dressed in Moroccan attire, appearing to float in front of a mass of multicolored shapes. He looks directly at us through eyes made of dark black brushstrokes, while his hands and feet blend into a geometric background composed of colored blocks. Sarghini’s more cubist approach here emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the canvas and reduces, fractures, analyzes, and rearranges his subject, thereby presenting a new way of seeing. By the mid-to-late 1960s, his work had become increasingly abstract.

Like Sarghini, Meriem Meziane bypassed training at Tetouan’s EPBA to directly enroll in 1953 at Madrid’s Royal Academy of Arts. Born in Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the African continent connected to northeast Morocco by a land border, Meziane came from a prominent military family, a privileged position that undoubtedly granted her this institutional access. Despite this, she is considered a key figure in Tetouan’s art history—a reflection of the specificity of Tetouan’s artistic milieu. Indeed, the art community in Tetouan was relatively small and tightly knit, and so artists were integrated into its history not only through formal training or teaching, but also through sustained presence—through friendships, regular exhibitions, and active participation in the local scene. Meziane, who had a studio in the nearby Spanish enclave of Ceuta during this period, was deeply embedded in the artistic network.²⁵ She also was the first Moroccan artist in Tetouan to ever have a gallery exhibition, making her undoubtedly an important part of the city’s artistic ecosystem. It is important to distinguish between the institution itself and what has been more loosely described by Areán and Bacaïcoa as the “Tetouan School” or “Pictorial School of Tetouan”—a critical category akin to the Casablanca Group, also known as the Casablanca School—that designates a broader artistic tendency rather than a formal affiliation with the ENBA. 

Much like Sarghini, Meziane monumentalized the commonplace. According to art historian Samir El Azhar, Morocco is omnipresent in her paintings—particularly the beauty of its landscape, the generosity of its people, and its ancestral traditions.²⁶ Meziane was especially interested in women’s performance of social, ritual, and festive activities and borrowed her subjects, colors, and forms from her home in the Rif Mountains.²⁷ Art historian Mohamed Adib Slaoui has noted that her “realistic” paintings were particularly focused on Imazighen, jbali (people of the mountains), and Tetouani women and their costumes, jewelry, and social traditions, thereby giving the work a special “ethnographic and cultural vision.”²⁸ One such example is the Jebilat painting from 1950 in the permanent collection of the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMVI) in Rabat (fig. 7). Farmworkers were a common motif in modern painting across the Arab world, and here, Meziane presents them as the backbone of a newly independent Morocco.²⁹ According to Meziane, she wished to reflect her country in her work, especially “people of my own kind, of my own race, born between the Mediterranean and Black Africa who illustrate a great ethnographic richness including all aspects of Africa, Arab, and Berber civilizations . . . a picture that is born and ends in Morocco.”³⁰

Meziane has noted that her decision to study in Madrid’s art academy was due to her desire to adopt the “figurative style” that remained a dominant artistic approach throughout her career.³¹ While loyal to figuration, she also included more experimental formal elements in her work. In an undated oil painting titled Femmes à la fenêtre (Women at the Window), she has presented a landscape that moves away from realism, favoring a more geometric style (fig. 8). The colors are bold and exaggerated, with each element of the scene heavily outlined and brushstrokes left visible. On the left-hand side of the composition, two women in white headscarves and monochromatic dresses stand side by side, one gazing outward, the other turned inward with anxiety. We can interpret this painting as a commentary on the role of women in the newly independent nation, with the seemingly anxious woman serving as a metaphor for Morocco’s past while the woman in orange represents a more optimistic future, one in which Morocco is fertile, lush, and blossoming. We can also interpret these women as symbols, or guarantors, of future generations.

The artist Meki Megara utilized a variety of formal approaches, including the artistic tendency known as hurufiyya, or “letterism,” which merged modernist abstraction with Arabic calligraphy. He was consistently in dialogue with other Arab artists throughout the 1950s and 1970s via pan-Arab conferences, biennials, and exhibitions. Of all Tetouani modern painters, Megara was perhaps the one most championed by Spanish art critics and media outlets (fig. 9). They often presented him as the perfect example of the compatibility between so-called Moroccan sensibilities, such as calligraphy, and Spanish training. Scholar and friend of the artist M’hammed Benaboud has described Megara as “always open to the West but his life was a typical Tetouani one.”³² In his 1973 text Cinco momentos en cien años de arte español: 1874–1973, Areán expresses that what is most interesting about Arab artists like Megara is that “they all master the European ways of processing matter, eroding it, and applying it with refinement”; they use “occidental” techniques yet maintain “a deep-rooted loyalty to the Arab spirit.”³³ He goes on to present Megara as an artist familiar with Spain and the “technical procedures” that “any good European painter” would know but ultimately a “man of the Islamic world” who is naturally and innately “concerned with calligraphic ease and the free flow of lines.”³⁴ This is arguably a simplistic and essentialist reading of his work. Placed in the context of postindependence Morocco, Megara’s work is radical in its engagement with artistic trends of the larger Arab world and its break from academicism. 

Saâd Ben Cheffaj, who was particularly concerned with conveying a unique Mediterranean identity, has often described himself as “of the Mediterranean”—rather than African, Arab, or Moroccan.³⁵ I view his adoption of religious iconography and signs and symbols of the ancient civilizations as a desire for mythmaking in order to equate Tetouani identity with a sophisticated Mediterranean culture. By associating with ancient civilizations, Ben Cheffaj is aligning himself with the Western world and its artistic canon—a subject he taught at ENBA (fig. 10).³⁶ He adopted figuration, expressionism, neorealism, and abstraction while exploring this unique subject matter. In the mixed-media work Composition from 1976, we see Ben Cheffaj’s signature style combining nude figures and references to ancient mythology emerge for the first time (fig. 11). The composition is structured in four sections: In the upper right, the repeated word “Amosis” references the Egyptian pharaoh, while pyramidal forms appear below. To the left, a statuesque female profile recalls the stylization of Minoan frescoes. Ben Cheffaj’s choice of subject matter aligns him with pan-Arab artistic trends of the time. Artists of the modern period were looking to ancient civilizations and regionalism; Lebanese excavated Phoenician culture, while Egyptian artists referenced the Pharaonic past.

Last but certainly not least, Ahmed Amrani is perhaps the most enigmatic figure of this generation. After returning to Morocco in 1965, he began teaching drawing, and by 1976, he had been named deputy director of ENBA, a position he held until 1984, when he left to assume his new role as director of Tetouan’s Ethnographic Museum. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Amrani’s work was the most politically charged and formally diverse of all his peers. His painting Protesta (1969)—the subject of my forthcoming monograph with Anthem Press—was a response to the Rif Revolts. I argue that other paintings, such as Adelante (1979) and Palestina (1978), serve as expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause and as metaphors for domestic turmoil in Morocco during the Years of Lead (1962–99).³⁷ In 1979, with the help of Bouzaid, Abdelkrim Ouazzani (b. 1954), and Habiba Bouhoumou, Amrani would launch the Spring Exhibitions in Tetouan, thereby introducing installation art to the city and changing the course of the institution for good.³⁸ 

Moroccan art critics and art historians have not been kind to Tetouan’s modern artists. In his seminal text Peinture et identité, Khalil M’Rabet deems the alumni of the school “hispanized” in their training and comments that “in the end . . . nothing special stands out, except that each one aims at a personal style.”³⁹ He goes on to argue that Tetouan’s artists were “more connected to the metropole [Madrid] than to the rest of Morocco. It is not by chance that ‘The School of Tetouan’ was for years pampered in isolation.”⁴⁰ M’Rabet’s belief that “nothing special stands out” is an example of a popular pervasive attitude among Moroccan curators, collectors, and critics that Tetouan’s art school is “conservative,” “an island,” and even “a prison” where artists regurgitated a Spanish style of art-making.⁴¹ For Mohammed Melehi (1936–2020), who studied at the EPBA before becoming a central figure in the Casablanca Group, what he and his peers were doing was a “far cry from the decrepit academic dogma” found in Tetouan’s art school.⁴² These words portray Tetouani artists as not upholding the celebratory narrative of the decolonial artist that has come to be expected of those working in postcolonial contexts. 

The Tetouan art school’s slow transition away from the conservative arts pedagogy inherited from Spain coupled with the Rif region’s disenfranchisement by the state are reasons why the city’s modern artists have been understudied, misinterpreted, and sidelined in Morocco’s national art history. Although artists like Megara, Ben Cheffaj, Amrani, and others were experimenting in their own work, as demonstrated above, a pedagogical shift at the institution did not take place until the 1990s, when a young Faouzi Laatiris (b. 1958) launched his Volume and Installation workshop in 1993. Tetouan’s artists of the 1950s through 1970s, with their diversity of formal approaches, demonstrate that Moroccan modernism is multifaceted and challenge the singular definition of Moroccan modernism that has prevailed in the rapidly developing historiography of the past few decades. 

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for Figures 3 and 8 in this article. If you hold the rights to any of the material used and have not been contacted, please reach out to contact_c-map@moma.org so that proper credit can be attributed or the material removed.

The post An Alternative Moroccan Modernism: Tetouan’s National School of Fine Arts from Independence to the 1970s appeared first on post.

The Triangle Network is a global network of artists and visual arts organizations that supports professional development and cultural exchange among artists, curators, and other arts professionals worldwide. It was initiated in 1982 by Anthony Caro and Robert Loder in New York City with the first Triangle Artists’ Workshop, and over the next two decades, grew into an international network of workshops using the “Triangle model.” Held in over 20 countries, the workshops put artists in touch with their peers in other countries and relied on donations in kind and grants for funding. The Triangle Arts Trust coordinated workshops internationally and raised funds to develop the network.¹

The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Berry Bickle (fig. 1) delivered at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in November 2024. Bickle was invited to discuss her role as an organizer of the second Triangle Network Pachipamwe workshop in Zimbabwe (August 12–26, 1989), known as Pachipamwe II, and her subsequent participation in various Triangle Artists’ Workshops in Africa in the 1990s.

I’d like to begin with an introduction to Pachipamwe—both as a project and as it was introduced to fellow Zimbabwean artists and to me.

In 1988, our first gathering, the first Pachipamwe workshop, took place in Murewa, Zimbabwe, about 120 kilometers north of Harare. By way of background, the Triangle [Artists’] Workshops had been initiated in South Africa in 1985. Robert Loder had a network of Zimbabwean friends, including Pat Pearce, a wonderful artist in her own right and an early supporter of Zimbabwean stone sculpture.

In a conversation between Pat and Robert, Robert introduced to Pat the idea of the possibility of a workshop in Zimbabwe. From there, the contact was made with Tapfuma Gutsa, who at that stage had recently graduated from City & Guilds in London and had returned to Zimbabwe—actually returning to live in Murewa. The initiation of the workshop really came about through this triangular relationship between Robert Loder, Pat Pierce, and Tapfuma Gutsa.

We were invited to Murewa, and our host and venue was the Murewa Culture House, which had been built post-independence. It was intended as a kind of blueprint that would be replicated throughout the country, although in reality, I don’t think the initiative ever really extended beyond Murewa itself. Even so, it was a very interesting proposition: to place contemporary artists within a culture house that had been conceived around localized cultural practices.

In other words, the space was primarily oriented toward music and other forms of cultural production rooted in local traditions. So the introduction of a group of contemporary artists into that space became a very interesting proposition—raising questions about where contemporary art practices might be situated in relation to more traditional conceptions of a cultural venue.

The initial workshop at Murewa had some quite extraordinary elements. We were welcomed in a very traditional sense, within a very specific ceremonial framework. Not only were we introduced to the culture house itself, but also we were introduced to the ancestors. The ancestors were told what we were doing there. That created a very powerful sense of linkage—between something that operated within a known cultural and spiritual framework and something that was, in many ways, unknown: a group of contemporary artists gathering to work together.

There were 14 artists in total. The emphasis of the workshop was very much on sculpture, because the initial sensibility was to somehow invigorate what was perceived as a somewhat moribund stone sculpture movement. The idea was that the workshop might introduce a new dynamism that could move that practice forward. So there was both a focus and a kind of urgency around sculpture.

Three artists from Bulawayo were invited: me, a painter; Rashid Jogee, also a painter; and Adam Madebe, who worked in metal. We came not as outsiders, but with a different sensibility. Similarly, David Koloane [and] Bill Ainslie, both from South Africa, and Willard Boepple, who came from America, brought additional perspectives. Meanwhile, the other sculptors and participants were deeply engaged in the Zimbabwean stone sculpture movement. So the presence of painters and artists working in other mediums introduced another dimension into the workshop.

It was very dynamic—extremely interesting. What was particularly compelling to me was the intergenerational dimension of the conversations. There was an exchange between very established, well-known stone sculptors and a much younger generation. Figures like Tapfuma Gutsa and Brighton Sango had already begun to break away from what stone sculpture had been in the decades since the 1960s. That internal tension and expansion made the workshop especially dynamic.

The workshop itself was full of revelations. It was inspiring, energetic, and transformative. Murewa became, in a sense, the beginning—the heartbeat—that brought Pachipamwe, or at least the need for further workshops and continued interaction between artists, into sharp focus.

The link between what happened in Murewa in 1988 and Pachipamwe in 1989 came through an exhibition titled Artists on the Frontline, hosted at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm. This exhibition brought together artists from Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. At that time, this was a very contentious proposition, because we were still in the midst of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The inclusion of South Africa alongside so-called frontline states was politically sensitive.

Having met Bill Ainslie in Murewa, I had a conversation with him in Stockholm. I asked:  “What is the point of meeting our Angolan, Mozambican, South African, and Zimbabwean counterparts in Stockholm? What we need is to meet in Africa.”

Because we had both participated in Murewa, the idea emerged that we could apply for funding to expand the workshop. We wanted to create a situation where artists from across the region could come together, get to know one another, and strengthen their ties on African soil, in Africa itself.

This was also deeply tied to the political realities of the time. South Africa was still under Apartheid. It was extremely important to support South African artists by inviting them into a space where they could participate freely—something that would not have been possible within South Africa itself. Workshops like Thupelo had limitations under those conditions. Pachipamwe, by contrast, offered a space in Zimbabwe—at Cyrene Mission (fig. 2)—where artists from across the region could gather.

The choice of Cyrene Mission was shaped by multiple, layered considerations. One of these was the significance of place. Cyrene is located near the Matobo Hills (fig. 3), a World Heritage site known for extraordinary rock art—paintings that are millennia old. These works were created by migratory artists, and this idea of migration resonated deeply with us. The artists who had painted those caves had moved across regions that are now divided into separate nation-states.

In our postcolonial moment, we were trying to recover narratives that had been fractured by colonialism and war. The proximity to a site of such deep cultural, historical, and artistic significance made Cyrene a powerful location. The second element was Cyrene itself. Established in 1939 under the Anglican Church by Canon Paterson, it began as an art school for people with disabilities. Over time, it expanded due to demand. The murals in the chapel—created by successive generations of students—are particularly significant. Canon Paterson encouraged his students to interpret Christian iconography through their own vernacular forms. These murals remain today and are quite unique.

There is also a lineage connecting Cyrene to later artistic training in Zimbabwe. Many artists who trained under Paterson went on to teach at the Mzilikazi Art & Craft Centre in Bulawayo. The artists who participated in Pachipamwe were, in many cases, students of those teachers. So Cyrene represented an important historical node in the development of art education in Zimbabwe. 

Finally, there were practical considerations. As a school, Cyrene could be used during holidays. It provided accommodation, studio space, classrooms, and large communal areas. Artists could occupy classrooms, work in halls, or use outdoor spaces. All of these factors contributed to making Cyrene an ideal site. 

At Pachipamwe, the workshop expanded from 14 artists in the first Murewa edition to 22 in 1989. There was a strong emphasis on inviting regional artists—from Botswana, South Africa, Angola—as well as international participants. Communal spaces played a crucial role. The dining area, in particular, became a central social space (fig. 4). I believe very strongly that the ability for artists to socialize easily—to move between formal and informal interactions—was essential to the flow of the workshop. Studio environments were intense and focused, so these moments of gathering, eating, and conversation were equally important in building relationships.

Sculptors often chose to work outdoors, while other artists occupied interior spaces. There was also experimentation across mediums. Voti Thebe introduced a papermaking workshop, bringing in new techniques and materials. This created opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange—sculptors, for example, engaging with paper as a material.

Materials in general were limited. One of the solutions we found was to use industrial packaging paper, which came in large rolls. This allowed artists to work on a much larger scale than they were used to. Many artists did not have access to personal studio space, so this sense of expansiveness—of being able to work big—was transformative (Fig. 5).

At this stage, Zimbabwean stone sculpture (fig. 6) remained a dominant force, but it was also being challenged and expanded. Tapfuma Gutsa (fig. 7) was particularly important in this regard. He broke many of the established conventions of stone sculpture, incorporating mixed media and developing forms that moved beyond carving into construction. He worked with welders, stone carvers, and materials such as cement, building rather than subtracting.

International artists also had a strong influence. Sokari Douglas Camp (fig. 8), for instance, had a significant impact on artists working in metal, including Adam Madebe (fig. 9) and David Ndlovu. The scale of Sokari’s work opened up new possibilities for these artists.

Bill Ainslie’s presence was also crucial. As the founder of the Johannesburg Art Foundation—a key institution for Black artists during Apartheid—he brought both experience and political weight. His return to Cyrene, where he had taught in the early 1960s, was deeply meaningful. Helen Sebidi (fig. 10), introduced by Bill, was another important presence. The inclusion of women artists was a key aspect of Pachipamwe.

Evenings were dedicated to discussion. Artists brought slides and presented their work. These sessions lasted one to two hours and were highly discursive. Rather than formal critiques, the exchanges were more akin to open conversations or studio visits. Participation was voluntary, and the format remained organic. The workshop itself functioned as an intense, immersive environment—almost like a pressure cooker. Artists stepped away from their everyday lives and worked intensely for two weeks within a collaborative framework. 

The impact of Pachipamwe extended across the region and beyond. Artists from Botswana went on to establish Thupelo Botswana. Namibian artists created Tulimpamwe. And then Mbala was created in Zambia. These are direct linkages from artists who visited the Zimbabwean workshops and then went on to create workshops in their own countries. 

The Mozambican artist Fatima Fernandes came to the Pachipamwe workshop in 1990. This was a workshop that was held outside of Harare. She then returned to Mozambique and initiated the Ujamaa workshops (fig. 11). I assisted her in an organizational capacity in Mozambique.

The Ujamaa workshops were held in Pemba. At that stage, Mozambique was still in the grips of a civil war, so Pemba was effectively the only safe place where we were able to host artists. What we are seeing here is the group, and also the environment of what Pemba was like—and where we were able to host the workshop.

Another important point is that the linkages through Mozambique brought us very close to Lusophone Africa and also to South America. There were, for instance, artists from Peru and from Brazil. The dynamic of the Mozambican workshops extended into South America, into Brazil, and into the Lusophone context. This became a very dynamic and interesting example of how the interconnectivity of workshops had an extraordinary capacity to extend intercontinentally.

Ujamaa, I think, had three editions. After the initial workshop in Pemba, there were two further editions in the city of Maputo, in which I was still engaged as a participant. 

We are also looking here at the exhibition from the Ujamaa workshop (fig. 12). We had to transport all of the work from the very north of Mozambique back to Maputo in order to host the exhibition. Exhibitions were an important part of the workshops. Not always—only when it was possible to formalize them—but when we could, it was very important to have an audience view [them] and to make the work accessible and open to audiences.

We were able to do that with the Pachipamwe exhibitions as well. We mounted exhibitions through the national galleries of both Bulawayo and Harare.

The final Pachipamwe workshop at Cyrene was held as a tribute to Bill Ainslie. We were able to invite his two children, and we inaugurated a small library that still today is attributed to Bill. So the last Pachipamwe at Cyrene in 1993 had that commemorative dimension.

Bill died in a car accident returning from Pachipamwe in 1989. It was extremely tragic. It was also something very close to us, because we had been working with him intensively for two weeks. Following that, we established a remembrance library at the Cyrene Mission—the Bill Ainslie Library.

This became part of the final Pachipamwe workshop held at Cyrene in 1993: both a memorial to Bill and an opportunity to invite his two children, who are both artists in their own rights, to participate in the workshop. It was the final Pachipamwe workshop in which I was directly involved as a participant.

After that, Pachipamwe went on to have another life. It passed into the hands of younger Zimbabwean artists, who continued to organize workshops. I believe they hosted workshops in Mutare, in the eastern part of Zimbabwe. It became an initiative for a younger generation of artists—artists who perhaps had different needs and expectations from those that shaped the original Pachipamwe and its initial formation.

The workshops continued until around 1996. And then, in a sense, their necessity was no longer there. So they came to an end—quite organically. I think that this is perhaps how the workshop movement should function, that it [should come] to a natural end when artists no longer feel the same urgency or need for what the workshops once provided.

An important development that followed is how artists who had been involved in the workshops began to build their own residency programs. These programs allowed them to invite international artists to come and work in more sustained environments—spaces that were structured more as residencies than as short-term workshops.

This is also a very important point: In a sense, out of the workshop experiences came Robert Loder’s investment in longer-term spaces. First, the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, which continues to be an important site for artists’ studios, and then Gasworks in London.

The sensibility of the workshops—their dynamism, their intensity, their openness—had a profound influence on these later developments. It led, in a way, to the idea of creating permanent working studio spaces for artists. From there, the network evolved further, becoming centered on residencies, enabling exchanges between African artists and international artists, and facilitating opportunities for artists from Africa to work in places like London.

The Bag Factory, for example, remains very dynamic today. It continues to offer space for visiting artists to take up studios and participate as residents.

Personally, I have taken a great deal from the workshops. The works of my own that I have included here are from around 2000–2001. I think that the introduction to new ideas around materials and media came directly from the workshops.

Having watched artists working in metal, I became very interested in expanding what had previously been, for me, a largely two-dimensional practice—drawing, painting, collage. From there, I began to move into other materials. My interest in metal, in particular, came directly from working alongside artists who were engaged in that medium (figs. 13, 14). That was a direct influence of the workshops.

I will never forget watching Sokari Douglas Camp work. That experience has stayed with me for a very long time. I returned to it later, carrying the memory of having shared that creative environment—an environment that was marked by generosity.

And I think that this is one of the defining aspects of the workshops: the generosity of artists in sharing their ideas, their knowledge, and their space.

These elements never left me. I have included my own works here to reflect that sense of curiosity—the desire to explore different mediums—which emerged from working alongside artists who were themselves working across different forms and materials.

When I think back on the broader context—the histories and conditions that had separated these nations, these Southern African countries—I am struck by how necessary it was to begin breaking those separations down. The workshops created something else: a space based on linkages rather than borders.

And I think that this was one of the most important and compelling motivations for being part of the workshops.

The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and C-MAP Africa Group Leader). Read more about C-MAP here. 

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1.

As one’s eyes dart between the formal contrasts in this silver gelatin print by Sabelo Mlangeni, observing the ways the image’s compositional differences never quite settle—elliptically forming and unforming in accordance with what figures or details the viewer momentarily foregrounds—we might take note of a quiet antagonism that labors within and beneath its visual field, one that interrupts the logics of identification that cohere the genre of portraiture. There is, in other words, a syncopated visual music in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township that emerges in the dynamic correspondence between the socio-material embodiment of the three photographed figures and the docu-realist aesthetic framing of Mlangeni’s camera. This tension raises more questions than answers as to who these figures are and what their relationships to each other might be. The image belongs to Mlangeni’s series Isivumelwano (2003–20), which documents wedding ceremonies and marital festivities throughout South Africa (and also in neighboring states such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Eswatini). In the process of looking, we are prompted to refract the image through our own internal virtual archives of wedding celebrations, a cross-referential activity of visual recall that perhaps yields no further clarity. 

Among the three figures that confront us, who might Mbulelo be? Has Mlangeni positioned them in the center, or are they the figure on the left, who appears to stand out the most due to their relatively taller height and femme-adjacent presentation? This figure’s black, tight-fitting cross V-neck, which features a campy lace sleeve, and luminescent jewelry to match, forms a striking optical tension with the relatively normative loose-fitting white shirts worn by the other two figures, who are unaccessorized. It is at this moment, through Mlangeni’s choreographed conflation of aesthetic form and social signification, that the regulatory logics of gender and sexuality become foregrounded as organizing principles in the visual field. The effeminate figure in black forces a double take, one that destabilizes the presumed normativity of the neighboring figures. As if emanating a kind of irruptive, radioactive matter, this figure produces a semiotic disturbance in the texture of the composition that subverts the (colonial) association of bridal femininity—and by symbolic extension, virginal purity—with racial and chromatic whiteness. Such exorbitant matter and its disorderly effects have, in recent history, gone by the name of “queerness.”¹

Yet, if indeed Mlangeni’s image invites a reading of these three Africans as corporeal figurations whose desires, expressions, and practices counter the structures of compulsive heteronormativity, there remains the unanswered question if what we see here is a glimpse of a “queer” African wedding.² If so, might we be looking at a fragment of the wedding’s stylish guests? Or alternatively, might one, or even two, of these figures in fact be the newly wedded couple? 

2. 

South Africa is the only country on the African continent that currently recognizes marital contracts between same-sex couples. This juridical exception is due to a combination of economic, historical, and geopolitical factors stemming from the termination of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the country’s subsequent reintegration into the capitalist world-system following decades of international boycotts and sanctions. The country’s neoliberal, progressive rebranding as a multicultural “rainbow nation”—amenable with an expansive outlook on human rights that includes sexual orientation—was based on a structural disavowal of decades of racial capitalist degradation and violence.³ These systemic forms of material, psychological, and spiritual denigration continue into the present day. Although discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has been constitutionally protected since the state’s liberal democratic makeover in the 1990s, same-sex marriage was not legalized until 2006. 

Mlangeni’s image is set in the Thembisa township, a spatial artifact of an apartheid-era policy that dispossessed indigenous Africans of their land and enclosed them as proletarianized units of racialized labor in surveilled and resource-extractive death zones. This social fact necessarily complicates potentially innocent readings of this image and the series to which it belongs as unfettered celebratory scenes of black love and kinship. That Mlangeni’s image, like Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (fig. 2), is dated 2004—that is, before the legalization of same-sex marriage in South Africa—further gestures toward some of these depicted ceremonies as social-performative scenes wherein subjects refuse the recognition or valorization of their unions within the juridical confines of the postcolonial state.⁴ Therefore, while some images in the series materialize queerness as the warm, anticipatory illumination of an irreducibly utopian not-yet future, Mlangeni doubly situates such visions of Afri-queerness within and against the ongoing future-aborting machinations of settler coloniality and racial capitalism.⁵ It is precisely this visually articulated entanglement—authorized by Mlangeni’s fidelity to documentary ethics and a self-consciousness about the photographic apparatus’s subjective mediation—that lends his images their qualities of historical truth and affective potency. 

Importantly, Mlangeni’s Isivumelwano series does not only document queer marital unions. In fact, most of the pictures render conventional heterosexual couples. That being said, I suggest that Mlangeni’s work allows us to witness the enduring constitutive animations of what Hugo ka Canham has termed the “riotous deathscapes,” within which black working-class South Africans exist. Regardless of their sexual orientation, these individuals queerly articulate their historically undermined attempts at forming and sustaining bonds of intimacy, kinship, and commitment.⁶ Therefore, my use of “queerness” here exceeds identitarian ascriptions. Rather, it names processes and relations that unsettle and exceed the racially gendered and sexualized means through which the colonial-capitalist matrix of power reproduces itself on a global scale.⁷

Indeed, throughout Mlangeni’s series, we observe a multitude of black working-class, Afri-queer, and Afri-indigenous disidentifications, creative appropriations, and outright rejections of the colonial-bourgeois genre of the “white wedding.”⁸ Here, the wedding ceremony is projected as a revelatory social stage where contradictions of race, gender, sexuality, and private property are woven into turbulent convergence. Their inseparable articulations are determined by the ever-shifting structural configurations of the South African postcolony, as well as the neocolonial world-system to which it is interminably subjected.⁹

3. 

The rhythmic oscillation between joyous sociality and structural violence indexed in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township recalls a series by Mlangeni titled Country Girls (2003–9; fig. 5–8). In the scores of monochrome images that make up the project—all similarly shot over several years on analog film—we are given mediated access to loosely connected countryside communities of queer South Africans living in Mpumalanga province. Like Thembisa, Mpumalanga bears the unhealed geological, metaphysical, and societal scars of racial capitalist brutality due to coal mining and industrial agriculture. Yet, in Mlangeni’s series, we’re still able to hear the impossible thrums of black queer social life—wayward forms of social relation composed in the wake of the recursive catastrophe of coloniality.¹⁰ Such anarchic social geometries do not arise in a vacuum, but rather are intergenerationally sustained through forms of reproductive, system-antagonistic labor embodied by what Joy James calls the “captive maternal.”¹¹

In Country Girls, a figure like the queer activist Bafana Mhlanga might approximate such a labor function. During a recent conversation, Mlangeni spoke of Mhlanga’s profound formal and informal organizing efforts, which provided the refuge-like conditions for the intimate, subterranean gatherings so movingly depicted through his camera lens.¹² In Bafana getting ready for work (2009; fig. 5), Mlangeni captures Mhlanga from behind with a towel wrapped around his waist as he inches towards an open door. The interior space is humble—a pot on a table, some objects on a dressing stand, a sheet lazily draped over a couch that might have just been slept on. The composition retains an atmospheric, soft-focus blur—as if Mlangeni took the image in a quick, improvised instant. Centering Mhlanga’s modest space and modest work through modest means, Mlangeni’s sensuous interior image alludes to a more capacious understanding of love, an “anoriginary” conception that precedes and transcends its institutionalized reification by wedding ceremonies or marital festivities.¹³ This is a socially and temporally dispersed, non-individuated kind of love; a stubborn love of people who colonial modernity has long rendered valueless, unlovable; an ungovernable love that maintains an aversion to Power, no matter the cost; an intoxicating love, ever so determined, that seeks out and architects the birth of liberatory possibility.¹⁴

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From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners and toured studios, archives, museums, and independent initiatives. Upon their return, the travelers were invited to reflect on a single moment that shaped their experience and prompted them to reconsider their work at MoMA. Because these responses are intentionally brief, they do not fully capture the breadth of encounters that shaped the experience. 

The group extends its heartfelt thanks to Chahrazad Zahi, whose knowledge and good spirit were integral to the trip. The group also remains deeply grateful to the many artists, scholars, collectors, and cultural workers across Morocco who so generously shared their time, knowledge, and spaces with us, and whose hospitality and openness made the journey possible including but not limited to the following: Oumayma Abouzid, Amina Agueznay, Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, Amina Belghiti, Amina Benbouchta, Hicham Benohoud, Meriem Berrada, Khalil Binebine, Mahi Binebine, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hicham Bouzid, Nadia Chabâa, Larbi Cherkaoui, Kamal Daghmoumi, Florence Renault Darsi, Hassan Darsi, Touria El Glaoui, Safaa Erruas, Oumaima Haitof, Hassan Hajjaj, Laila Hida, Amine Houari, Abdellah Karroum, Imane Lahrich, Othman Lazraq, Mohamed Mourabiti, Amina Mourid, Mounia Yasmine O’Neal and the team at The Mothership Tangier: Khawla, Chef Mohamed, BaMjido, Othmane, Saïd, and Si Mohammed; Juan Asis Palao Gómez, Mehdi Qotbi, Karim Rafi, Younes Rahmoun, Sara Rerhrhaye, Nadia Sabri, Abderrahim Yamou, and Fatiha Zemmouri.

The 2026 C-MAP Africa trip was organized and researched by Beya Othmani, the C-MAP Africa fellow (2024–26).

Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, C-MAP Africa Group Leader

On Mohamed Chabâa 

The stewardship of an artist’s legacy is something I find deeply compelling, especially when it is taken on by family members. Nadia Chabâa, an art historian who has dedicated herself to her father’s legacy, stands out as a particularly inspiring example. Before our visit to her home, my knowledge of Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) was spotty and largely limited to his role in the triumvirate that founded the Casablanca Art School. But his contributions ran much deeper. He combined artistic practice, theory, and pedagogy, and architecture was at the heart of it all.

In 1966, Chabâa joined the Casablanca Art School as a teacher, leading workshops in decoration and graphic arts and establishing an Arabic calligraphy workshop as a core part of the curriculum. Alongside Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), he co-organized Présence Plastique, a manifesto-exhibition held in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech in 1969, deliberately bringing art into public space.

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco’s first architecture school, and in 1994, he returned to his alma mater, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, as its director, overhauling both its Italian classical curriculum, which had been place since Chabâa was a student there in the 1950s, and its pedagogy. There, he shaped a generation of Moroccan artists now active on the international scene, including Younes Rahmoun and Safaa Erruas, both of whom we visited during our trip.

I was also quite impressed with how Chabâa’s own artistic practice evolved over the years, from hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to looser abstraction in the 1980s to more gestural lines from the late 1990s onward.

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

C-MAP research trips typically culminate over a year’s worth of distance learning. They are an on-the-ground continuation of the dialogic, group-based learning practiced by C-MAP members at MoMA in their monthly meetings with artists, curators, and scholars, which are organized by the C-MAP fellow and the C-MAP group leader. Thus, our short but precious visit to Morocco was but one piece of a larger and longer-term project with deep roots in our institution’s mission to connect people to and through art.

This metaphor of piecing or putting together lends itself to the many ways of making we experienced in our multicity venture via plane, train, and automobile. I was particularly struck by the power of pattern, which emerged as a salient trope for artists with whom we met or whose works we saw on view at various venues. Whether it is the repetition of an iconic image in the works of Safaa Erruas or Hassan Hajjaj or the repetition of a shape or color in urban and religious architecture alike, such as at the Madrasa Ben Youssef, pattern permeated our visual field. Meeting with Amina Agueznay brought pattern into the conversation a different way, specifically through the traditional weaving patterns incorporated in her work Curriculum Vitae from 2020–21, which comprises dozens of blocks made by weavers from different communities across Morocco. Each block represents that weaver’s “language,” which is passed down from generation to generation and is either well known or endangered. Agueznay also showed us Burials, a work from 2024 that also meditates on waving as a language, creating parallels between words and stitches. 

Leonardo Bravo, Director of Public Engagement, Department of Learning and Engagement

The opportunity to travel to Morocco with the C-MAP Africa group felt like stepping into a long-held dream. Since my youth, Morocco has occupied a vivid place in my imagination—shaped by the mystique of North Africa, the wandering spirit of the Beats, and the hypnotic sounds of the master musicians of Jajouka.

To finally move through the country itself—along the vibrant streets of Marrakech, amid the coastal rhythms of Casablanca and the layered histories of Tétouan and Rabat, and across the luminous threshold of Tangier—was to encounter a reality even more compelling than the one I had imagined.

Across these cities, Morocco revealed itself as a landscape shaped over millennia, where culture and history unfold in layered and interconnected ways. It is a place continually formed and re-formed through the shifting currents of empire, colonization, and self-determination.

Particularly moving was the exhibition on Berber and Amazigh culture across the Maghreb at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts, which offered a powerful testament to the grace, dignity, and resilience of these communities. The presentation underscored how Amazigh cultural traditions continue to resonate across generations and geographies.

Among the many memorable encounters during the trip, our visit to Think Tanger stood out. The work of Hicham Bouzid, Amina Mourid, and their collective—creating a platform for collaborative learning, research, and public inquiry—deeply resonated with my own interests. Their experimental, research-driven approach to collective knowledge-making at the intersection of arts, culture, and civic life closely aligns with my institutional work.

I left the visit inspired and hopeful about developing stronger connections that might lead to future collaboration with MoMA.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Our time in Morocco was sprawling in its scope, intensive in its sensibility. From Marrakech to Casablanca, then Rabat to Tétouan, our final day in Tangier remains crisp in my mind’s eye.

The night prior, we had visited Yto Barrada’s inimitable Cinémathèque Tangier—followed by a convivial dinner over which we discussed Morocco’s expanded presence at the forthcoming Venice Biennale (Barrada representing France; Amina Agueznay representing Morocco).

On a dewy, fragile morning, the group arrived at The Mothership, where we encountered the expanded fields of Barrada’s artistic and social practice. In ethos, The Mothership is a site for artistic retreat, experimental research, and interdisciplinary exploration inspired by natural dyes and Indigenous traditions. Physically, it consists of a series of studios and dwelling spaces occupied by visiting residents, collaborators, and Barrada’s family. These are threaded together and surrounded by a variety of flowering and subsistence gardens.

Situated on a dramatic set of cliffs that overlook the Strait of Gibraltar and face Spain, the view from the rear balcony of The Mothership is anchored by a massive tree. Here, Barrada has constructed a sturdy platform that one can access through netted passageways entangled among branches. She calls this her raft.

In considering this view, I was catapulted back to the first time I leafed through her photobook A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005)—a project that shaped my understanding of the stakes of contemporary photography in Morocco and which anchors MoMA’s photographic holdings of Barrada’s work.

Looking skyward at her raft, I was plunged back into the world of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny that Barrada had shaped at MoMA through Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft (2021–22), which was organized thoughtfully in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Gallun.

Still reeling from the loss of Jay Levenson—who has made, and continues to make, so much possible within and beyond MoMA—I was reminded of what it means to sustain an insistent generosity of spirit and a rigorous fidelity to life in all of its forms.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance

Mother, Ship

Yto Barrada has been building rafts with others for over twenty years. Consider the tree house she made in 2005 in the garden of her Tangier home, which later that year she photographed and called Raft in Strangler Figtree. Or her 2021 tabletop sculpture—Tamo’s Raft (Le radeau de Tamo)—included in her Artist’s Choice exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Yto’s rafts are rarely flat, much like the buoyant structures made of fastened materials used by migrants as makeshift boats. You don’t need me to recall images of Mediterranean migrants here for you to call to mind the morphological echoes between Yto’s assemblages and the vessels captured in photographs endlessly circulated via news and social media.

Those shapes are echoed in the meandering wires that wind atop Tamo’s ship and hover in the diagonal lines of ladders extending below the tree house and web of branches linking the two-hundred-year-old strangler fig tree to her house.

In this trail of associations, ghosted but not forgotten, a network of rafts seems to breed more floating platforms. There is a technical word for this type of vehicle: a mothership, designed to carry, lead, or serve other vehicles as they travel through water, air, and space.

Yto’s rafts tend to float in groups. To call them “Yto’s” rafts is itself a usable fiction. They are perhaps better described as our rafts; Yto keeps them company.

Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections

Specificity, universality, transmission of ideas, connection, circulation, and yes, beauty.

Younes Rahmoun’s presentation at the Tétouan School of Fine Arts helped me reflect on the experiences, new ideas, and hope that were centered during this most enlightening trip to several cities in Morocco.

Formed and informed by his family tradition, and deeply rooted to his locality, Younes discussed his background and practice. I enjoyed learning about his Ghorfa (room) series in particular. With his mother’s support, he inhabited a small space under the stairs in the family home, which became his studio—a space for work and meditation. He translated that architectural space into a series of drawings, objects, and installations in various media.

Some installations appeared in gallery contexts, while others were situated in the landscape—but always with the artist’s intended desire for the viewers to concentrate on their “here and now.” His presentation also spurred me to contemplate the path to my current role, from my first art history courses at Smith College, where Younes had a residency and solo exhibition in 2024 that included his most recent Ghorfa, which he installed in the woods a few miles outside of campus.

The show was curated by Emma Chubb, who joined our meeting in Tétouan, and together we all toured the School of Fine Arts library and discussed the critical importance of collecting, preserving, and making accessible research materials, particularly of artists, populations, and regions that may be underrepresented in research institutions.

I am grateful to all the inspiring people we met throughout the trip, and I felt honored to think together with such wonderful MoMA colleagues, including our dear Jay Levenson, who helped open horizons for so many with his humor and humility.

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

I am very grateful to all the collectors, collectives, curators, publishers, researchers, and, of course, artists (including their families and colleagues) across Morocco who so generously welcomed us into their homes, studios, spaces, museums, galleries, and cinemas over the course of the 2026 C-MAP Africa research trip.

At MoMA, artists and makers are integral to the stewardship of the collections. A clear thread that emerged during this journey was how the process of making—of choosing materials and techniques, of collaborating with others—is deeply influenced by histories, religion, language, politics, and communities.

In the beautiful city of Tétouan, we were fortunate to visit Safaa Erruas in her downtown apartment studio. She shared with us her “ideas and materials from my internal kitchen” and talked about an artwork Les Drapeaux (2011–12).

This piece consists of the flags of the 22 Arab League member states reimagined as white pearls embroidered on sheets of 600 gsm cotton paper, reflecting on the Arab Spring.

Embroidery is a local tradition, passed down from mother to daughter, and the Tétouan practice is known for its stylized flowers and geometric shapes on unbleached canvas. It was interesting to hear how she worked with local embroiderers to create this painstaking work.

The multilayered significance of this approach and method reminded me that beyond materials and process, people are at the center of art and also, by extension, museum collections.

Jay Levenson embodied this ethos: Meet artists in their communities, where they are.

In memory of Jay Levenson (1948–2026), Director of MoMA’s International Program

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Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of artists aspired to create a new visual idiom, one that could carry collective memory while moving beyond state-sponsored art movements—particularly Socialist Realism—and breaking away from colonial representations.² This impulse developed as a momentum shaped by the urgency to redefine modes of artistic production within a postcolonial framework. Among the designations used to describe it, the “School of the Sign” remains the most ambivalent, at once reductive and generative. The term itself is often misunderstood in two ways: First, it implies the existence of a unified movement based on a shared aesthetic. Second, it risks confining a broad concept to a form of formal nationalism, suggesting that the turn to the Sign is a retreat into identity or the revival of a dormant tradition.

The “School of the Sign” refers to a conceptual and material proposition concerned with how the Sign can be mobilized as a critical space through art and literature. Far from constituting a school in the institutional sense, it is more aptly understood as a constellation of artists who explored the “Sign”—a term they preferred to “letter” or “symbol”—as a dense visual structure capable of articulating a grammar of liberation.³ Guided by the thought of writer Jean Sénac, Algerian artists such as Mohamed Khadda (1930–1991; fig. 1), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), Denis Martinez (b. 1941; fig. 2) and, later, Ali Silem (b. 1947) contributed to a conceptualization of the Sign as a palimpsest that is simultaneously abstract and situated, mystical and insurgent.⁴ This concept must also be considered in relation to the visual frameworks that have long shaped the reception of North African art, ranging from Orientalist projections to patrimonial models. Rather than reiterating colonial categories, these artists treated the Sign as a site of critical engagement against academic norms.

A central figure in Algeria’s postindependence cultural scene, Jean Sénac was primarily known as a poet and art critic, but he also played a crucial role as a mediator among artistic, intellectual, and political circles. In 1964, he founded Galerie 54, the first independent exhibition space in Algiers, which he conceived as a platform for experimental practices. Here, Sénac presented the work of artists such as Khadda and Martinez and coined the term “École du Noûn” (Noûn School). At the height of the postcolonial cultural revival, he made a first attempt at theorizing his observations, writing: “The Sign, rising from centuries past, from remote douars, from the songs of the meddahs [storytellers], bears witness to the permanence in the Maghreb of what could be called the École du Noûn.”⁵ The “École du Noûn,” according to him, arises from the sensuality of the letter noûn, drawing on its dual resonance as a sacred character in the Qur’an and a visual form associated with desire. Sénac’s interpretation posits the noûn as all at once a female breast,⁶ an open beginning, a Sufi promise, and a corpoème (body-poem)—the latter a figuration in which poetry and corporeality are inseparable. This fusion of corporeal pleasure and textual creation lies at the heart of his poetry.⁷

Rather than defining a unified movement, Sénac sought to name a shared sensibility he perceived across the practices of several artists. From the late 1960s onward, he increasingly referred to this sensibility as the School of the Sign. The Sign, in his view, constitutes a living matrix rooted in Algerian heritage while remaining open to contemporary invention. While some artists—most notably Mohamed Khadda—engaged closely with Sénac’s writings and shared his conviction that the Sign could catalyze an artistic renewal,⁸ others maintained a more distant or independent relationship to his theoretical framework. Indeed, the School of the Sign did not emerge as a self-declared collective or common agenda but rather as Sénac’s own critical reading of converging artistic trajectories connected through dialogue and proximity. Artists of the Sign drew inspiration from Amazigh and Arabic scripts, prehistoric petroglyphs, and vernacular forms, aspiring to create a simultaneity of heritage and revolution. They did this by, for example, fragmenting cursive letters into angular modules, overlaying layers of script until legibility dissolved, or embedding geometric motifs from woven textiles into abstract chromatic fields. 

The School of the Sign resonated with other artistic strategies in the region, such as Hurufiyya, an aesthetic movement that emerged among artists reinvesting ancestral signs as a means of resisting folklorization and gesturing toward plural modernities.⁹ Emerging across the Arab world from the late 1940s onward, Hurufiyya designated a broad tendency that reintroduced the Arabic letter into modern artistic practice, often emphasizing its calligraphic and spiritual dimensions. While artists associated with the School of the Sign shared this refusal of folkloric repetition, they approached the letter less as a calligraphic form and more as a destabilized visual structure displaced from its conventional function. The turn to rock paintings, desert lines, and marginal alphabets did not aim to produce a nostalgic aesthetic; rather, it sought to reactivate the semiotic depth of these forms by working their internal tensions between figuration and abstraction, legibility and opacity. In Algeria, this engagement developed largely outside formal Hurufiyya circles and was instead shaped by local postindependence debates and artistic networks. Later figures, such as Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947), would more explicitly align with Hurufiyya principles, albeit within a different historical moment and a transnational framework.

The School of the Sign was not devoid of internal frictions—notably, artists debated the very definition of popular art. The tensions ranged, on the one hand, from opposition to approaches that understand popular art as a shared visual heritage to be stabilized and made socially legible to, on the other hand, positions that emphasized abstraction and formal experimentation as a necessary break from inherited and imposed models. Multiple approaches to the Sign coexisted without canceling one another. These divergences became particularly visible in the distinct ways individual artists positioned themselves in relation to abstraction, spirituality, and the use of the letter. Artists such as Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017) gravitated toward lyrical abstraction infused with an Islamic sensibility.¹⁰

Born in Western Algeria, Benanteur followed an artistic path shaped by close personal and intellectual affinities rather than formal group affiliations. His long-standing friendship with Mohamed Khadda, forged in the mid-1940s when the two painted together around Mostaganem before traveling together to Algiers and later to France, was formative in this respect. Benanteur also maintained close ties with Jean Sénac, whose work he illustrated on several occasions and with whom he shared a commitment to postindependence cultural renewal.¹¹ Taken together, these relationships situate Benanteur within the same generational and cultural milieu as the artists associated with the School of the Sign, even though his practice gradually shifted toward a more autonomous lyrical abstraction.¹² His work draws on the iconoclastic heritage of Maghrebi Islam and articulates a dynamic sense of universality. Although he occasionally deployed letters in his work and engaged in debates surrounding the Sign, Benanteur remained wary of prescriptive frameworks, privileging an approach grounded in individual spirituality and a universal conception of modern art.¹³

For his part, Sénac emphasized the proximity and divergence of Benanteur and Khadda in terms of their relationship to the Sign and to Islamic visual heritage. Referring to Khadda’s audacity in “reintegrating the Signs into the Body”¹⁴ and seeking to “reincarnate the arabesque of his ancestors,”¹⁵ Sénac notes that Benanteur, for his part, “having started from the Sign, seems to want to preserve only its trace, its aura,” bringing the noûn back “to its point of preciseness,”¹⁶ whereas Khadda carried it toward a lyrical transcendence. This distinction sheds light on Benanteur’s singular position: situated within the same generational milieu, yet gradually moving toward a more autonomous and meditative abstraction.

Others, like Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), worked the letter as a sensual form in its own right, one saturated with ambiguity, and explored the representation of the female body. His engagement does not follow the conventions of the academic nude; it is an allegorical image of the nation itself, tattooed, inscribed, and resilient, carrying cultural memory and strength in the face of war and historical trauma.¹⁷ In the later Les Protectrices (1991), he continued to work the Sign in close relation to the female body, intertwining fragments of letters with corporeal forms (fig. 3). Here, writing does not appear as an autonomous calligraphic pattern but instead as an inscription borne by the figure itself—tattoo-like marks and the Arabic title al-ḥāmiyāt (the protectresses) fold the letter into the body, suggesting language as something carried and worn. The painting shows that even decades after the emergence of the School of the Sign, Mesli maintained an interest in the Sign as a lived and embodied language rather than a purely formal device.

Mohamed Khadda, by contrast, approached the Sign as a political project.¹⁸ In his collection of essays Éléments pour un art nouveau (1972), he insists on the need to create a plastic writing that is neither subjected to Western abstraction nor limited to a rigid tradition.¹⁹ This position was shaped in part by his experience as a typographer in France, as well as by his artistic training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he was exposed to modernist debates while remaining attentive to the materiality of writing. In this same collection of writings, Khadda describes his creative process as one shaped by layers, rhythm, the interplay of positive and negative spaces, and the tensions between surface and depth.²⁰ He emphasizes the plastic transformation of writing and its capacity to convey spiritual, poetic, and political dimensions, evoking letters as “male or female, solar or lunar,” and animated by a suggestive power akin to incantation.²¹

A photograph of Khadda’s atelier (fig. 4) provides a more concrete understanding of this process. This image shows a space filled with canvases at different stages, placed side by side and often overlapping. Signs reappear in one painting after another, shifting in scale and density. Tools and materials remain visible. The studio reflects a practice based on repetition, layering, and gradual transformation, which is consistent with Khadda’s background in typography and his sustained attention to the potentials of the Sign.

Some artists associated with the School of the Sign decided to further expand their reflection on the Sign by founding the Aouchem group (aouchem means “tattoo”) in 1967. Initiated by Denis Martinez, Choukri Mesli, and Mohamed Benbaghdad, among others, the group proclaimed in a groundbreaking manifesto that “the Sign is stronger than bombs.”²² Aouchem approached the Sign as a trace of ancestral gestures and collective memory. They drew from the prehistoric cave paintings of Tassili n’Ajjer, popular talismans, and sacred scripts, introducing a decolonial interplay between art and ritual. The group asserted a lineage that was both African and Arabo-Berber and bound together less by formal doctrine than by friendship. Aouchem was, above all, a circle of close friends who met regularly, particularly in Blida, where long discussions and moments in everyday life contributed to their cohesion. These ties were not limited to exhibitions: Members also collaborated on texts, radio programs with poets, and the drafting of the manifesto. Alongside their collective initiatives, they informally circulated symbolic gestures, such as emblems or amulets bearing the group’s name, without ever imposing a uniform aesthetic.

Jean Sénac, acting as a mentor, encouraged the inclusion of other Algerian artists, such as Baya (1931–1998) and Arezki Zerarti (1938–2024). He also played an important role as a mediator between artists and writers, maintaining close ties with members of the group and supporting the circulation of their work through exhibitions, publications, and broadcasts. In Algeria, where figuration could be perceived as either an academic colonial inheritance or propaganda, Aouchem chose abstracted figuration, opting for hybrid and interstitial creatures. Their refusal of both illustrative imagery and pure abstraction became a gesture of emancipation. The covers of the 1967 Aouchem exhibition catalogues (figs. 5, 6) reflect this stance. Both compositions bring together signs, fragmented figures, handwritten elements, and ornamental motifs, which are arranged without a clear hierarchy or focal point. Figurative references appear and dissolve without settling into a stable image or legible scene. Printed with a mimeograph, the catalogues preserve traces of their production: irregular lines, uneven lettering, visible overlaps. These material imperfections distinguish them from institutional graphic formats. The covers do not present a coherent visual statement; instead, they allow disparate marks, images, and gestures to coexist on the page.

Within Aouchem, the Sign became a means of activating a form of visual consciousness grounded in collective practice. While the group shared common concerns with the artists associated with the School of the Sign, it did not operate as its continuation. Rather, Aouchem developed in parallel, shifting the emphasis to material processes, ritual gestures, and collective experimentation. The materiality of the works themselves played a part in this effort. Some artists treated the canvas as a ritual surface, layered with ochers, earth, ash, natural pigments, and ink—materials that evoke an ancestral and vernacular register (such as henna or mineral earths), linking the pictorial gesture to imagined precolonial practices. For them, the Sign was no longer confined to drawing or inscription, but instead embodied in matter itself, making materials carriers of meaning. In addition to sourcing ancestral materials, Aouchem artists drew from their recent historical experience to develop a new vocabulary of the Sign. The barbed wire—a recurrent motif in the works of Denis Martinez, for example, emerged as a charged symbol: at once border, carceral memory, and visual marker of the constrained body.²³

Denis Martinez’s Le petit miroir (1967; fig.7) illustrates how the precepts of the School of the Sign materialized within Aouchem as an expanded artistic practice. The piece is a mixed-media assemblage made of three branches, animal bones, and paper, among other materials, and stands somewhere between an image and a sculpture. Across the surface, there are silver, calligraphy-like motifs—dots, geometric patterns, short gestural arabesques, and words drawn from Algerian dialect—that are placed on fractured planes and roughly human-shaped forms. These Signs do not organize themselves into writing; indeed, they remain dispersed, uneven, and materially present. The combination of painted wood and raised forms gives the Sign a totemic presence, grounding it in artisanal practice. Here, it is no longer conceived as a system of visual forms to be read, but rather as a physical presence embedded in the object itself. Freed from its function as writing and reconfigured as an element of the assemblage, the Sign emerges through matter and volume, extending its logic beyond the pictorial field into a material and experiential register.

Ali Silem is another Algerian artist who built on the concept of the Sign. He defended the idea of a Sign in motion and of an open visual alphabet that rejects both identity-based assignment and state appropriation. He once remarked, “When you take a bird’s feather, for instance, you notice that it has the shape of the [Arabic letter] alif.”²⁴ For him, the task was to move beyond the “School of the Sign” as a label or myth and to reimagine it as a fluid space of creation nourished by the friction between ancient forms and contemporaneity. While Silem’s work remains in dialogue with the concerns articulated by Mohamed Khadda and the artists associated with Aouchem, it unfolds along a distinct register. The Sign, in Silem’s view, does not reference a glorified past.²⁵ Moreover, although his practice—like that of Aouchem—reflects his interest in nonrepresentational Signs and a refusal of academic figuration, it is not positioned as a rupture and ritual confrontation. In one untitled work, for example, calligraphic fragments dissolve into color, rhythm, and painterly gestures, preventing the Sign from settling into meaning, keeping it in a state of visual flux (fig. 8).

Whereas Benanteur tended to preserve the Sign as an evanescent trace or aura, while Mesli embedded it within figuration, Silem approached the letter through restraint and compositional measure. As Khadda observed, Silem’s surfaces are structured by carefully “mastered trajectories,” a “cascade of noûn,” an “ascension of lâm,” and the discreet presence of alif as tutelary linear anchors, so that the Sign functions less as an embodied or atmospheric motif than as a controlled calligraphic architecture oriented toward balance and serenity.²⁶ For Silem, the Sign functions as a phenomenological event that is experienced before it is interpreted.²⁷ This emphasis on color, vibration, and poetic resonance is reinforced by the artist’s parallel activity as a poet, a pursuit he shares with artists such as Denis Martinez, for whom the Sign also circulates between visual and textual registers. In his lecture “Peintres et poètes d’Algérie,” Silem situated Algerian visual practice within a long continuum of “written stones” (hajarat el maktûba), where alphabets and drawings have been intertwined for millennia, and where contemporary artists continue to seek an embodied memory of inscription.²⁸ In this lecture, Silem reflected on the long-standing entanglement of poetry and painting in Algeria, situating contemporary practices of the Sign within an older culture of orality, and tracing the role of artist-poet collaborations and bibliophile editions in the postindependence period.

What is singular in the way these artists engage the Sign is its semiotic operation. It is neither purely symbolic (in the Saussurean sense) nor reducible to index or icon. Beyond repeating motifs from pre-Islamic, Islamic, or Amazigh visual repertoires, these artists have transformed the Sign into a language charged with symbolic meaning that has been polished and displaced from its original function. It is often syncretic, combining plastic elements from disparate image regimes—magico-religious, vernacular, calligraphic, modern—within an unstable grammar. The point for these artists was not to convey a clear message but instead to unsettle the gaze, to demand a mode of reading that remains open, partial, and unresolved. These practices echo critical semiotic theories (such as those of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco), which consider the Sign not as a transparent translation of content but rather as a surface of friction between the visible and the sayable.²⁹

If the Sign once served as a tool of decolonization, it has also, over time, been absorbed, recontextualized, and periodically emptied of its initial function. The legacy of the so-called School of the Sign has been transmitted in fragmented ways—celebrated as a landmark of Algerian modernity, yet often reconstructed retrospectively through teleological narratives.³⁰ Over the decades, some artists have claimed this lineage. The very use of the term “school” has contributed to a partial museification of their artistic gestures, transforming what was a critical impulse into a closed chapter in the national art historical canon. This shift must also be understood within a broader context: the rise of postcolonial cultural policies, the globalization of art markets, and the rebranding of the Sign as a “cultural marker.” Displayed in this context, the Sign risks becoming precisely what it once resisted: an inert ornament rather than a living grammar of liberation. 

In this sense, the School of the Sign is more than just a historical episode or an art movement. It is a critical horizon ready to be reactivated within other struggles and that stands as a philosophy of making and an ethic of form. In his essay “Sur L’olivier,” Khadda compares the Sign to an ancestral olive tree: a living structure, as opposed to a fixed form, in a steady process of growth and resistance, continually reshaped by time and experience.³¹ For Khadda, the olive tree stands as a point of origin, a genesis from which Signs and writing emerge as traces (and not representations) bearing the memory of endurance, erosion, and continuity. With his conception of the Sign, Khadda proposes a method to inhabit Signs without either taming or submitting to them.

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On February 1, 1974, the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil published a shocking headline: “Younousse’s Slashed Painting: A Simple Matter of Scissors.” According to the article, Senegalese artist Younousse Seye (b. 1940) discovered that her painting Mame Coumba Bang (n.d.) had been vandalized as she guided Ethiopian visitors around the second Salon des artistes sénégalais at the Musée dynamique de Dakar, Senegal’s national collection. This event had high stakes: Pieces from the salon would be selected to tour internationally as part of the landmark traveling exhibition Arts sénégalais d’aujourd’hui opening in the Grand Palais in Paris. One might imagine, then, the shock, panic, and disappointment Seye must have felt upon seeing the strips of fiber that she had embedded into her painting sliced off and scattered across the floor. 

Apart from three newspaper articles describing the incident, no visual record of the work survives. Nevertheless, reconstructing the imaginative depth of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang through descriptions of its defacement opens a window into contested struggles within Senegal’s postindependence art world. Specifically, a closer reading of this scandal reveals not only the gendered and racialized structures of the cultural landscape Seye was navigating, but also her insistence on challenging them.

Before displaying her work in the Musée dynamique, Younousse Seye had emerged quickly on the Senegalese arts scene. Born in Saint-Louis in colonial Senegal in 1940, she came of age amid African independence movements, and her career evolved in tandem with this long moment of decolonization. Working across oil, wood, iron, marble, poetry, and cinema, the self-taught Seye expressed Pan-Africanist and feminist sympathies, grounding her oeuvre in woman-centered African aesthetic practices, techniques, and themes. While local artists of her generation share her Pan-African ideals, Seye’s assertive feminism distinguishes her work, periodically generating tensions with her male peers.¹

By the time Mame Coumba Bang was exhibited at the 1974 Salon des artistes sénégalais, Seye was more than a decade into her practice. Her creative sensibilities first developed when she was a child, while she assisted her mother in dyeing batik, working outdoors and observing nature’s color palette.² She began painting in her spare time in the mid-1950s while pursuing secretarial work. The First World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN), held in Dakar in April 1966, marked a pivotal moment in Seye’s career. Eager to participate, she volunteered as a hostess and, through her encounters with Black artists and intellectuals from across the world, found the inspiration that led her to fully commit to an artistic path. Within three years of her participation in FESMAN, she shot to fame as both a painter and an actress, starring in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1968 Venice Film Festival. By placing her work in the film’s background, Seye drew further international attention to her developing visual arts career. 

During this period, Seye became renowned for her distinctive use of cowrie shells. Once used as currency in Africa, cowries convey symbolic spiritual and material power. Across the continent, cowries are also associated with fertility, women’s adornment, and feminine power. Seye was among the earliest artists to employ them as a material, threading them onto canvas or embedding them into marble or iron, and she believed that “the language of the spirits is passed down through the secret of cowries.”³ Through her signature use of the shell, Seye merged African spirituality, feminine symbolism, and continental themes of power and ritual in her work, creating a unique expression of Pan-African feminism. Her engagement with Pan-African themes quickly earned her the attention and patronage of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, who helped to propel her career from the early 1970s onward.⁴

Despite her success, Seye stood apart from other professionally exhibiting Senegalese artists in that she did not rise through the ranks of the Dakar School: a network of artists in the postindependence nation who received government patronage in the form of funding, training at national institutions, and participation in state-sponsored salons and exhibitions. It is notable that she never sought this label. Indeed, when Senghor offered her a teaching position at the national art school, she declined it.⁵ In this sense, Seye maintained a critical distance from the state’s cultural apparatus while, at the same time, benefiting from its international reach. 

This was not without its costs. Senghor, too, maintained an ambivalent position toward Seye: Though he extended his patronage, he also voiced reservations about her aesthetic choices. Upon seeing Seye’s solo exhibition at the Théâtre national Sorano Theatre in Dakar in 1977, for example, he derided her characteristic use of organic materials like cowries and vegetable fibers. Senghor disassociated Seye’s use of female-gendered materials—subject to decay over time—from the “eternal” qualities of high art. He elaborated, “This is what gives European artists their practical superiority. We must try to renew the African art of painting for eternity.”⁶

By the mid-1970s, many artists, critics, and intellectuals were expressing their disillusionment with Senghorian cultural policy, decrying its alleged neocolonial cultural visions and institutional structures.⁷ Critics felt their viewpoints affirmed when, in 1974, the minister of culture Alioune Sene appointed 26-year-old Frenchman Georges Hornn as curator of the Musée dynamique.⁸ Hornn had no curatorial experience; his artistic credentials included amateur photography and a film commissioned by the Senegalese government.⁹ He was appointed after arriving in Senegal as a coopérant militaire—a French civil service position that was itself a colonial legacy—two months prior.¹⁰ The defacement of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang in 1974 under Hornn’s watch just weeks into his tenure crystallized this widening divide between the state and cultural actors, and at the same time, it underscored Seye’s outsider status within the arts establishment. 

The vandalism of Mame Coumba Bang became public knowledge when, following the incident, the dramatist and critic Abdou Anta Kâ, who was Seye’s close friend, published a forceful editorial in Le Soleil. Kâ cast the slashing not as an isolated act, but rather as the result of institutional negligence under white museum leadership hostile to what he called “independent Senegalese painters.” He pointedly cited the Ethiopian delegates who first discovered the damage, noting their disbelief that works could be left unprotected in a state museum equipped with guards and a curator. According to Kâ, Hornn dismissed the incident altogether, claiming it was not “his business” to intervene.¹¹

For Kâ, this indifference exemplified broader tensions within Senghor’s cultural establishment. He framed the attack as symptomatic of a neocolonial cultural policy in which white juries determined which African works merited international circulation. These critics, Kâ argued, claimed authority by evaluating artists according to whether they aligned with their own schools or theories of a “Black African aesthetic,” a posture he likened to that of the cercle commanders of the colonial era.¹² In this reading, Seye’s work was vulnerable not merely because of individual malice, but also because its value was decided through Eurocentric criteria embedded in the attitudes of the museum’s leadership.

State officials swiftly rejected this interpretation. In an interview published days later, Hornn denied responsibility, accusing Kâ and Seye of exploiting the vandalism as a “Trojan horse” for personal grievances. He dismissed the episode as a publicity stunt “underpinned by false anger.”¹³ Alioune Sène went further still, condemning Kâ’s critique as exceeding “the measure of tolerable bad taste.” He trivialized the damage by reducing Seye’s use of yoss—a vegetal fiber traditionally used by Senegalese women for braiding—to a matter of “snipped tresses” and echoed Hornn’s claim that the controversy sought to undermine the jury’s discernment.¹⁴ Both men ultimately defended the authority of the museum and the legitimacy of the white jury as best qualified to represent Senegal on the international stage.

Notably absent from this exchange is Seye’s own voice. In later interviews, she recalled the perpetrator with restraint, describing him simply as someone who resented others’ success, and remarked bluntly of Hornn: “He didn’t like Younousse Seye” (fig. 4).¹⁵ Although Senghor later offered Seye compensation for the damaged painting, she refused it.¹⁶ For her, the incident was never about publicity or restitution, but rather the museum’s failure to protect African artists from the lingering structures of colonial power. Responsibility, she maintained, lay both with the individual who carried out the act and with the institution that enabled it.¹⁷

We still don’t know what Mame Coumba Bang looked like. After the Musée dynamique’s closure in 1988, much of the national collection was scattered, including this artwork.¹⁸ According to accounts in Le Soleil, however, the painting Mame Coumba Bang, which depicted the titular deity, was part of a six-painting series representing protector spirits from each region of Senegal.¹⁹ Mame Coumba Bang, the river goddess of Seye’s hometown, carries importance as a protector of the Saint-Louis branch of the Sénégal River. Other paintings in the series were likely named for different titular spirits. Across Wolof, Lébou, and other cultures, female water deities are revered for their ability to shelter residents from misfortune, ailments, and infertility. Wolof people adore Mame Coumba Bang, and ritual offerings to her remain common.²⁰ Seye’s invocation of Mame Coumba Bang personified the goddess as a nourisher and protector of the country—just as the river nourishes the land and its people.

By depicting a pantheon of female deities, Seye continued her practice of routing local symbolism through feminine iconography. For example, in L’Afrique Nourricière (c. 1970), Seye depicted three women producing milk from their pierced breasts. For Seye, the painting reflects the essential role of women as sustainers. When asked about the painting, she asserted that womankind “is the guardian of our traditions, mother, wife, educator. She is everything and everything revolves around her.”²¹ Likewise, Light Bearer (1971) depicts a female figure carrying a torch, which can be interpreted as symbolizing women’s roles in transmitting cultural traditions (fig. 3).²² Mame Coumba Bang thus fits squarely within Seye’s broader oeuvre. 

Mame Coumba Bang’s symbolism deepens with its materiality. According to the report in Le Soleil, Seye had woven the cowries onto a tuft of yoss.²³ Seye likely used yoss in the painting to celebrate its prominence in Senegalese feminine worlds, where it was historically employed by Senegalese women in the making of wigs, braids, and elaborate hairstyles, before the advent of synthetic fibers.²⁴ The fiber’s derivation from the land additionally highlights Seye’s attachment to nature. The gathering of yoss and cowries encapsulates themes essential to Seye’s work: her proud rootedness in Senegal, her reverence for the natural world, and an emphasis on womanhood. 

The choices of material, subject, and symbolism magnified the gendered stakes of the vandalism at the Salon: someone cut a tuft of yoss from the painting, causing it to shed fiber and cowries. Though the culprit was never publicly named, Seye claims he was a colleague who later confessed privately that he had defaced her painting out of jealousy.²⁵ Symbolically, this perpetrator cut away the trademark African and feminine dimensions of Seye’s work. Materially, too, the act jeopardized the chance that the jury would select Mame Coumba Bang to tour internationally with Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. Ultimately, despite the controversy and swarming accusations, the jury chose two of Seye’s pieces, Femme aux cauris (n.d.) and La danse des cauris, to tour with the exhibition in 1974 (fig. 2). Seye was the only woman in the show, which traveled internationally until 1980.

Mame Coumba Bang survives today only in fragments—in hostile press clippings and the artist’s own recollections. Its destruction exposes the fault lines in Senegal’s postindependence art world, where state patronage, neocolonial cultural agents, and gendered hierarchies coexisted with genuine ambitions for emancipation. Seye’s differential treatment as a self-taught woman—as a woman artist who forged a singular artistic path during this moment of decolonization—became visible precisely when her work required care, protection, and institutional recognition. That the painting itself is now lost only sharpens its significance. What was cut away in 1974 was not simply a tuft of yoss, but also the possibility that feminine, spiritual, and materially grounded artistic practices could be fully safeguarded within national cultural institutions. Reading Mame Coumba Bang through its defacement thus clarifies the terms under which artists like Seye were asked to create and the costs of doing so on their own terms.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful editorial guidance of Merve Fejzula.

The post A Painting in Pieces: The Defacing of Younousse Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang appeared first on post.

One such incident unfolded on Christmas Eve in 1991. Berenice, the childhood friend of South African contemporary artist Gabrielle Goliath (born 1983), was fatally shot in an act of domestic violence. In contrast to the detailed recordings of the negotiations to end apartheid, the circumstances surrounding Berenice’s death remain obscured. The day after the tragedy, Goliath visited Berenice’s mother, who, upon seeing Goliath, cried out “Berenice,” not “Gabrielle,” and clung to her tightly. Being addressed as “Berenice” had a profound impact on the artist. “I recall how this name, Berenice, was spoken over me, into me, as a kind of sunken chord. It is a name never to be mine, and yet mine and of my heart—to be borne, as part of me and to be shared,” states Goliath.¹  

Nineteen years after Berenice’s death, Goliath began producing a photographic series titled Berenice (2010–) commemorating her friend’s death. The series is ongoing and, to date, consists of three iterations, each composed of photographic portraits of sitters—mainly brown women, including the artist—surrogate figures for Berenice standing in her ghostly absence. The death of Berenice also catalyzed Goliath’s larger artistic practice of commemorative mixed-media installations dedicated to victims of racial and gendered brutality in and beyond South Africa.

Berenice 29-39 (2022; fig.1) is a serial installation of eleven portraits, each of which depicts a woman wearing a white, diaphanous, sleeveless shirt. Each sitter, gazing directly at the viewer, embodies the absent presence of Berenice. The portraits are life-size. They are composed in a head-and-shoulders format, set against backgrounds ranging from earth tones to muted pinks and purples. Along with commemorating Goliath’s childhood friend, Berenice 29-39 registers the bereaved mother’s cry of “Berenice.” Her reverberating call echoes in the unwavering gaze and embodied presence of the sitters, who, along with Goliath, take on the name “Berenice.” The sitters, therefore, undertake a complex task of not only standing in for Berenice but also channeling her mother’s call. 

The uniform head-and-shoulders composition of the portraits, which are tightly cropped at the upper torso, and their portrayal of stoic, straight-faced sitters conjure the visual language of administrative photographs. Meanwhile, the numbering in the individual works’ titles recalls the seriality of the state archive and its efforts to reduce people to anonymous, nameless subjects. Within South Africa’s historical context, a colonial photographic regime took shape in the newly formed nation in the early 20th century. It developed in tandem with cataloguing policies structured around gender, race, and class.² Building on these representational systems, South Africa’s apartheid government mandated that all individuals over the age of 16 be photographed and issued an ID under the newly enacted Population Registration Act of 1950. During this period, photography was adopted on a mass scale through the introduction of standardized headshots accompanied by classificatory textual codes that aimed to “fix and classify bodies.”³ Moreover, “racialized looking” became formalized, which had perilous implications for those classified as “African” and “coloured”—particularly Black people subjected to pass laws.⁴ 

By engaging with the state’s scopic regimes, Berenice 29-39 reveals the links between the visual norms of the colonial-apartheid administration and ongoing systems of violence that continue to position difference as vulnerable and disposable. Drawing from these visual arrangements, Goliath emphasizes the sitters’ labor of stepping into what she calls “that policed archival register”—the state’s regulatory system of order from which the series draws—as a way of invoking Berenice and resisting “the total capture of the archive and the photograph.”⁵

Berenice 29-39 is situated within Goliath’s ongoing investigation into histories of dominant representation and their contemporary afterlives. Goliath elaborates, “I’m directing much of my critique towards the field of aesthetics. A regime of representation that is itself already inherently raced, gendered, and classed.”⁶ Through this critique and the foregrounding of women in Berenice 29-39, Goliath’s portraits expose the aesthetic production of a universal subject—white, male, and heterosexual—often against fixed depictions of Black and brown women who, in turn, have been rendered hyper-visible and vulnerable to violence.   

Confronting the prejudice inherent in photography and archival traditions, Goliath disrupts their extractive and classificatory logics to produce portraits in her own way. Unlike the fixed, monochromatic background of administrative photography, the tonal shifts in the series’ backdrops—from earth tones to pink and purple—suggest movement and improvisation (fig. 2–4). Given South Africa’s enduring systems of racial-gender violence, these colors gesture to hope, possibility, and renewal within a landscape marked by brutality.

Contending with the limits and possibilities of photography and the archive, Berenice 29-39 calls for an engagement sensitive to Berenice’s mother’s call. These portraits encourage a perceptive mode of engaging with photographs, in line with the scholarship of Tina Campt—a significant inspiration to the artist—who foregrounds the theory of listening to images “as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.”⁷ Campt’s approach invites us to perceive photographs, including bureaucratic pictures, not only as images of rigid subjectivities but also as sites in which dissent and fugitivity take place. 

Unlike the small, state-issued photographs, Goliath’s photographs are life-size. By producing Berenice 29-39 at this scale, the artist encourages her audiences to confront the sitters head-on. The sitters’ presence is therefore inescapable as they look back at the audience—creating an almost mutual line of vision that troubles the panoptic gaze of the colonial-apartheid state.⁸ In this shared gaze between audience and sitters, questions arise about the potential of audience participation and photography: What might different ways of looking produce in the afterlives of the colonial-apartheid project, and how might the embodied presence of audiences extend the reach of Berenice’s mother’s call well beyond the photograph’s frame?

An Enduring Mourning

Goliath convenes sitters from her community to stand in for Berenice in the series. In this practice, which she refers to as a “lifework of mourning,” the artist’s ongoing series presents a shared, laborious ritual of invoking Berenice and the name her mother called out to Goliath.⁹ Unlike the individualistic, alienating dynamics of bureaucratic systems, Berenice 29-39 becomes a space of collaboration, relationality, and collective solidarity. In this prolonged ritual of mourning, Berenice 29-39 proposes a different mode of remembering, one that is open-ended, collective, and uninhibited by the forgetfulness inherent in linear, monumental memorials. As the series unfolds over an extended period and each sitter assumes the spectral presence of Berenice, the portraits rehearse—over and over—a method for living and remembering in the shadows of an empire determined to see difference as expendable and unmemorable.¹⁰

This public and labor-intensive ritual of grief enacted in Berenice 29-39 calls to mind political mourning practices in South Africa. During the 1980s, mass funerals of Black activists murdered by the apartheid regime in the 1980s—and the circulation of their photographic documentation—became a critical site of “militant mourning” and Black resistance.¹¹ More recently, the widows of the Marikana massacre, the wives of the Black miners murdered in South Africa in 2012, continue to mourn and demand justice for the reprehensible killing of the miners.¹² Situating Berenice 29-39 within these public practices of mourning brings into view Black traditions of mourning in South Africa as strategies of liberation and radical remembering.¹³ Goliath’s work is in conversation with these traditions and distinct in its enunciation of an artistic language rooted in durational embodied rituals that emphasize collectivity and relationality. 

By sustaining a ritual of mourning for more than three decades after Berenice’s death, Berenice 29–39 performs, as Goliath explains, “a certain refusal of ‘the archive’ as a political configuration of differentially valued life.”¹⁴ This refusal is enacted through duration, embodiment, and collaboration. Against systems that render racialized and gendered violence legible only through anonymized data, the series holds a name—“Berenice”—close, repeating it without exhausting it. As sitters enter a photographic archival register, they inhabit it otherwise, transforming seriality into ritual and standardization into a collective labor of care. The life-size portraits (fig.5) confront viewers directly, interrupting the one-directional gaze of administrative photography and recasting spectatorship as an ethical encounter. Attuned to the reverberation of Berenice’s mother’s call, Berenice 29–39 asks what it means to remain with mourning rather than to resolve it. In doing so, the series moves beyond critique to model a way of living with loss that resists closure and forgetfulness, insisting instead on the ongoing grievability of a life the archive failed to hold.

Gabrielle Goliath‘s Berenice 29–39 (2022) is on view in the exhibition New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, from September 14, 2025, to January 17, 2026, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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