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Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, also known as Cheik Nadro (11 March 1923 – 28 January 2014),[1] was an Ivorian artist.
Bouabré was born in Zépréguhé, Ivory Coast, and was among the first Ivorians to be educated by the French colonial government. On 11 March 1948, he received a vision, which directly influenced much of his later work. Bouabré created many of his hundreds of small drawings while working as a clerk in various government offices. These drawings depict many different subjects, mostly drawn from local folklore; some also describe his own visions. All the drawings are part of a larger cycle, titled World Knowledge. Bouabré also created a 448-letter, universal Bété syllabary, which he used to transcribe the oral tradition of his people, the Bétés. His visual language is portrayed on some 1,000 small cards using ballpoint pens and crayons, with symbolic imagery surrounded by text, each carrying a unique divinatory message and comments on life and history.[2]
Many of Bouabré's drawings are in The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) of Meshac Gaba. One of his emblematic drawings is saved in the L'appartement 22 collection on the African continent: "Une divine peinture relevée sur le corps d'une mandarine jaunie", made by Bouabré in 1994 in Abidjan.
- 2022: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound, Museum of Modern Art, New York[3]
- 2013: Venice Biennale, Italy.
- 2012: Inventing the world: the artist as citizen, Biennale Bénin, Cotonou, Bénin.
- 2010–2011: Tate Modern, London, UK
- 2010: African Stories, Marrakech Art Fair, Marrakech
- 2007: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK
- 2007: Why Africa?, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin, Italy
- 2006: 100% Africa, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
- 2005: Arts of Africa, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, France
- 2004–2007: Africa Remix, the touring show started on 24 July 2004 at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf (Germany), and travelled to the Hayward Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
- 2003: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Musée Champollion, Figeac, France
- 2002: Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany
- 2001–2002: The Short Century was an exhibition held in Munich, Berlin, Chicago and New York, organised by a team headed by Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor
- 1996: Neue Kunst aus Africa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germania
- 1995: Galerie des Cinq Continents, Musée des arts d’Afrique et d'Océanie, Paris, France
- 1995: Dialogues de Paix, Palais des Nations, Geneve, Switzerland
- 1994: Rencontres Africaines, the touring exhibition was shown at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Cidade do Cabo in Sud Africa, Museum Africa in Johannesburg and in Lisbon(Portugal).
- 1994: World Envisioned, together with Alighiero Boetti, the exhibition hwas shown in DIA Center for the Arts in New York and American Center in Paris
- 1993: Trésor de Voyage, Biennale di Venezia in Venice (Italy)
- 1993: Azur, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas (France)
- 1993: La Grande Vérité: les Astres Africains, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (France)
- 1993: Grafolies, Biennale d’Abidjan in Abidjan (Ivory Coast)
- 1992: A Visage Découvert, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas (France)
- 1992: Oh Cet Echo!, Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris
- 1992: Out of Africa, Saatchi Collection in London
- 1992: L'Art dans la Cuisine, St. Gallen in Sweden
- 1992: Resistances, Watari-Um for Contemporary Art, in Tokyo
- 1991: Africa Hoy/Africa Now, the touring exhibition has shown in Centro de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), Gröninger Museum in Groningen (Netherlands), Centro de arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City
- 1989: Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande halle de la Villette in Paris
- 1989: Waaah! Far African Art, Courtrai in Belgium
- 1986: L'Afrique e la Lettre, Centre Culturel Français, Lagos in Nigeria
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Samella Lewis, Artist and Activist for Art World Diversity, Dies at 99
In addition to painting, she was a historian who pushed for a more inclusive definition of art, in part by founding her own museum devoted to Black artists.
Samella Lewis, a Black artist and art historian who did more than just decry the racial blinders of the white art establishment, in part by founding a museum dedicated to promoting Black arts, died on May 27 in Torrance, Calif., near Los Angeles. She was 99.
Her son Claude Lewis said the cause was renal failure.
Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director of the Museum of African American Art, the institution Dr. Lewis founded in Los Angeles in 1976, noted her wide-ranging impact, calling her, in an email, “a leading voice in the scholarship on Black art, and a promoter of new pathways for Black artists.”
“She envisioned opportunities that did not yet exist for Black artists,” she added, “and then she created them.”
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In a remarkably varied career, Dr. Lewis also co-founded an arts journal, helped run galleries, made films about Black artists, taught at universities and wrote well-regarded books, most notably “Art: African American,” first published in 1978. That book (later republished as “African American Art and Artists”) remains influential, said Kellie Jones, a noted art historian at Columbia University, which, she said, is characteristic of Dr. Lewis’s various efforts: They have endured.
“She starts a magazine: Still in print,” she said in a phone interview. “The museum: still there.”
“She did it all,” Dr. Jones added. “She really did it all.”
Samella Sanders was born on Feb. 27, 1923, in New Orleans to Samuel and Rachel Sanders. (Two oral histories give her birth year as 1924, but her son said that she came to believe that 1923 was correct.) Her father was a farmer, and her mother was a domestic worker.
She grew up in Ponchatoula, La., northwest of New Orleans, and was drawing from a young age. In an oral history recorded in 1992 by the Center for Oral History Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, she said her first sale of an artwork was to her kindergarten teacher, who was impressed with how she had handled an assignment to draw a pig.
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“All the other children were doing brown pigs, white pigs, so I drew a purple one,” she said. “And I was determined that, in doing that pig, that I was not going to stay within anybody’s lines. I just drew lines, but then I moved outside of them. It was like the pig was vibrating.”
She enrolled at Dillard University in New Orleans intending to study history, she said, but at the urging of her high school art teacher, she took a freshman art course. Her professor was the artist Elizabeth Catlett, who became an important influence artistically and in terms of activism. When they would ride the bus together, for instance, Ms. Catlett would do things like grab the “For Colored Patrons Only” sign demarcating the Black seats and throw it out the window — a revelatory action for a young student who had simply accepted the racial situation in Louisiana as the way things are.
“There I am sitting there, having grown up under these circumstances, and here this woman comes and disrupts the whole situation,” Dr. Lewis said in the oral history.
Ms. Catlett changed her approach to art as well.
“One of the important things I learned in Elizabeth’s class is that you don’t paint people without knowing something about them and who they are and where they are,” she said. “I was painting these portraits, and she would say, ‘Who is this?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what are you painting it for?’”
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After two years she transferred to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, earning a bachelor’s degree in art history there in 1945.
She went on to do graduate work at Ohio State University, first studying printmaking, then sculpture, although she encountered some resistance in that genre.
“I ran into problems of not only racism but also sexism,” she said, “where my professors felt that women shouldn’t do welding” because of the heavy equipment involved. So she focused on painting and on broadening her study of art history, developing particular expertise in Asian and pre-Columbian art. She earned a master’s degree there in 1948 — the year she married Paul G. Lewis, a mathematician — and in 1951 became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in fine arts and art history at the university. A posting on a university website once called her “the godmother of African-American art.”
In 1953 Dr. Lewis was appointed head of the art department at Florida A&M University, which needed bolstering. According to the book “African Americans in the Visual Arts” (2003), by Steven Otfinoski, she once told the university president that she would paint his portrait in exchange for more funding for her department.
The Lewises became active in civil rights issues, and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and others led them to leave Florida in 1958, when Dr. Lewis took a teaching post at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. In 1966 she took a post at California State University at Long Beach. That same year she made the first of several short documentaries, “The Black Artists,” a survey of African American art.
Though she was vocal about Black art and artists, Dr. Lewis said that, especially in her teaching, she tried to draw on her expertise in Asian art and other areas to make connections.
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“I never taught courses where I closed the door: ‘This is African art and this is Caribbean art,’” she said in the oral history. “I tried to show interrelationships.”
But as the 1960s turned more strident, so did she on the subject of white domination of the art world. In late 1968 she left academia to be the coordinator of education at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, hoping to elevate Black art there.
“Anybody can have a quick Black show,” she told The Los Angeles Times at the time, but she sought more substantive change. She lasted a little more than a year before quitting, so frustrated at the lack of progress that she picketed her own museum.
“We have gone through several periods — slavery, emancipation, underpaid and overworked, pacification, integration, trying to prove something instead of dwelling in our own household,” she told The Progress-Bulletin of Pomona, Calif., in early 1972. “I’m fed up with this proving of self.”
In 1969, with Ruth Waddy, she published “Black Artists on Art,” forming her own publishing house, Contemporary Crafts, to do it. In it, Black artists spoke out, some vehemently, about their work and the obstacles they faced. The book (which was followed by a second volume in 1971) rattled the art establishment and the people who covered it, including William Wilson, art critic for The Los Angeles Times.
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“Statements by artists range from modest affirmations of a desire to make art of worth, to frankly militant rejections ‘of the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals who dominate the art scene’ and of white culture in general,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a review, in which he seemed to find the challenge thrown down by the book to be off-putting.
Dr. Lewis was also looking for ways around the white establishment. She had already helped establish the National Conference of Artists, a professional organization for Black artists, which continues today. And after leaving the Los Angeles museum, she was a founder of the Multi-Cul Gallery in Los Angeles, which focused on Black art and on selling works at prices almost anyone could afford.
In 1975 she and two others founded Black Art: An International Quarterly, which continues today under the name International Review of African American Art. Then, in 1976, came her Museum of African American Art, which has mounted exhibitions and run educational programs ever since.
Dr. Lewis resumed teaching in 1969 at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., where she remained for 15 years and which now houses the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection. Over the years she curated numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums.
And throughout her busy life, she found time to make her own art. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited in solo and group shows all over the country.
Her husband died in 2013. In addition to her son Claude, she is survived by another son, Alan, and three grandchildren.
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During a talk in Columbus, Ohio, in 2000, Dr. Lewis had a simple explanation for why people should respect artists of all races and backgrounds and try to hear what they are saying.
“They can tell us what will happen in the future,” she said. “They can tell us what we should have seen in the past.”
Turner received his first training in cartooning via the Art Instruction, Inc. home study correspondence course. During World War II, his illustrations appeared in the newspaper Stars and Stripes. After the war, while working for the Oakland Police Department, he created the comic strip Baker's Helper.
Turner appeared as a guest on the May 14, 1973 episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, where he showed the host pictures he had drawn of several of his neighbors, as well as presented a clip from his Kid Power animated series, which was airing Saturday mornings on ABC at the time.
During the Vietnam War, Turner and five other members of the National Cartoonist Society traveled to Vietnam, where they spent a month drawing more than 3,000 caricatures of service people.
Turner preferred being called "Morrie" and contributed his talents to concerts by the Bay Area Little Symphony of Oakland, California. He drew pictures to the music and of the children in the audience.
Turner married Letha Mae Harvey on April 6, 1946. They collaborated on the strip Soul Corner. Morrie and Letha had one son, Morrie Jr. Letha died in 1994. Late in life, Turner's companion was Karol Trachtenburg of Sacramento.
The Family Circus character of Morrie, a playmate of Billy — and the only recurring black character in the strip — is based on Turner. Family Circus creator Bil Keane created the character in 1967 as a tribute to his close friend.
Turner was honored a number of times at the San Diego Comic-Con. In 1981, he was given an Inkpot Award. In 2012, he was given the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.
Turner died on January 25, 2014, at age 90.
The works of Morrie Turner include:
Wee Pals collections
- Wee Pals That "Kid Power" Gang in Rainbow Power (Signet Books, 1968)
- Wee Pals (Signet Books, 1969) — introduction by Charles M. Schulz
- Kid Power (Signet Books, 1970)
- Nipper (Westminster Press, 1971)
- Nipper's Secret Power (Westminster Press, 1971)
- Wee Pals: Rainbow Power (Signet Books, 1973)
- Wee Pals: Doing Their Thing (Signet Books, 1973)
- Wee Pals' Nipper and Nipper's Secret Power (Signet Books, 1974)
- Wee Pals: Book of Knowledge (Signet Books, 1974)
- Wee Pals: Staying Cool (Signet Books, 1974)
- Wee Pals: Funky Tales (New American Library, 1975)
- Wee Pals: Welcome to the Club (Rainbow Power Club Books, 1978)
- Choosing a Health Career: Featuring Wee Pals, the Kid Power Gang (Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, Health Resources Administration, 1979)
- Wee Pals: A Full-Length Musical Comedy for Children or Young Teenagers (The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1981)
- Wee Pals Make Friends with Music and Musical Instruments: Coloring Book (Stockton Symphony Association, 1982)
- Wee Pals, the Kid Power Gang: Thinking Well (Ingham County Health Department, 1983)
- Wee Pals Doing the Right Thing Coloring Book (Oakland Police Department, 1991)
- Explore Black History with Wee Pals (Just us Books, 1998)
- The Kid Power Gang Salutes African-Americans in the Military Past and Present (Conway B. Jones, Jr., 2000)
Willis and his Friends
- Ser un Hombre (Lear Siegler/Fearon Publishers, 1972)
- Prejudice (Fearon, 1972)
- The Vandals (Fearon, 1974)
Other books
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Freedom (Ross Simmons, 1967)
- Black and White Coloring Book (Troubadour Press, 1969) — written with Letha Turner
- Right On (Signet Books, 1969)
- Getting It All Together (Signet Books, 1972)
- Where's Herbie? A Sickle Cell Anemia Story and Coloring Book (Sickle Cell Anemia Workshop, 1972)
- Famous Black Americans (Judson Press, 1973)
- Happy Birthday America (Signet Book, 1975)
- All God's Chillun Got Soul (Judson Press, 1980)
- Thinking Well (Wisconsin Clearing House, 1983)
- Black History Trivia: Quiz and Game Book (News America Syndicate, 1986)
- What About Gangs? Just Say No! (Oakland Police Department, 1994)
- Babcock (Scholastic, 1996) — by John Cottonwood and Morrie Turner
- Mom Come Quick (Wright Pub Co., 1997) — by Joy Crawford and Morrie Turner
- Super Sistahs: Featuring the Accomplishments of African-American Women Past and Present (Bye Publishing Services, 2005)
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