Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue by galerielelong

Ficre Ghebreyesus Gate to the Blue

Ficre Ghebreyesus Gate to the Blue Galerie Lelong & Co. New York

7 Foreword 11 Conversation 31 Essay 47 Exhibition images 87 Works in public collections 94 Artist biography 96 Colophon

Foreword

“When I paint I am accompanied by dissonances, syncopations, and the ultimate will for life and moral order of goodness.”

“Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life,” wrote Ficre Ghebreyesus in his artistic statement for admission to Yale University.

Remarkably, Gate to the Blue was Ficre Ghebreyesus’s first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery, and one of the few exhibitions realized in his lifetime or posthumously.

Representing and promoting an artist’s life work when the artist can no longer guide us is a great responsibility and privilege. In bringing Ghebreyesus’s work to the public, we have been blessed with the generous collaboration of Elizabeth Alexander, the artist’s wife and soulmate. She has shared Ficre’s life, kept the paintings safe and honored us by entrusting his work to the gallery; we will

Unexpected but completely harmonious color combina tions, dissonant and synergetic compositions and images layered like stanzas in a poem are all apparent in Ficre Ghebreyesus’s paintings; the conceptual framework of “painting as a manifestation of the will for life” and “a moral order of goodness” are revealed to those who, like the artist, believe painting can communicate a personal and universal truth through history and across geographies, cultures, and time.

Upon his untimely death in 2012, Ficre Ghebreyesus left a studio replete with over 800 paintings, a production all the more impressive given that he was also an accomplished chef and restauranteur, an activist, a photogra pher and filmmaker, loving father and devoted husband.

Mary Sabbatino Vice President and Partner Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

8 honor her commitment and trust with our ongoing work to assure his place in the canon. We are also grateful to those supporting Elizabeth in the artist’s legacy: Solomon and Simon Ghebreyesus, Melay Araya, Key Jo Lee, Josie Hodson, and Kathryn Kaelin.

At Lelong, the exhibition would not have been possible without the inventive care Bianca Cabrera, Head Registrar, lavished on the work. Assimilating over 1000 works in a few months was an enormous challenge, but she rolled up her sleeves, put on her mask, and organized its safe transport, assisted by Jon Cancro and Paul Loughney. Ashley Martin assisted with photography and framing. Grace Hong has ably organized the catalogue, special events, and press. Mycroft Zimmerman provided warm assistance at all levels. I could not wish for a better partner in the work of representation than Lindsay Danckwerth, Director of Special Projects. Her dedication to the artist is profound, and her understanding of the nuances in the paintings is extraordinary; within days, it seemed like she had memorized the entire inventory. Eight years after his untimely death, we were privileged to enter the dream world that is Ficre Ghebreyesus’s art in the exhibition Gate to the Blue, fulfilling the artist’s desire of sharing his art and story with the world, as he had penned: What are dreams if one is not able to dedicate one’s life to them and share them with a larger community than the self?

With Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran

Jason Moran

This event was held on Thursday, September 10, 2020 at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York and streamed “live” on Zoom

Elizabeth Alexander Welcome! We are here. This is a big night, to have this show of Ficre’s paintings, to be in the midst of all his work at this beautiful gallery space. And I wanted you, Jason, to come and talk with me so that we could bring Ficre a little more into the space with us, together. And so that we could talk about the pictures that we see here, share memories, and talk about making art with all of the senses and all of the self together, which is so much a part of who Ficre was.

Alexander Oh, it’s something! Of course, I was in the studio all the time with him and was seeing things as they were being made. And one of the things that’s really nice about the show is that even in its formal composition, it replicates the way he worked, which is to say that there was always a large unstretched piece like this one, Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden , that he would be working on.

Conversation and Virtual Toast

It is. It is about the sensibility and of every scale, right? The ones you honed, the ones you carry with you because someone showed you. And I wonder for you, as you look around the room and also have spent the past few years really thinking about how he represented himself in this form versus within the kitchen, or within the home as a father and a partner—looking at this work, as the pieces are meeting themselves again on the wall in this room, what does it feel like to walk back into this space?

Moran Did you all ever talk about the dream state? You know, dreams he remembered? Did you all have a practice of waking up in the morning saying, “I have to tell you what I just dreamt?”

Then there were medium-sized pieces and the little bitties and then there were drawings, but it was all happening at once. I laid eyes on everything. I used to have my painting count of 882. But thanks to the great Bianca of Galerie Lelong, there are more paintings, works on paper and photographs. Never did I see them like this. He eschewed framing for the most part. He was making with a fever pitch and a fever pace. To see them all like this literally feels like walking into an illuminated cavern.

Moran Because something is planted in each of the works, I mean, we always talk about this in music. The demand it takes to replay a piece, from set to set, night to night, year to year, you play that song again. And every time you try to like, smear something a bit differently, you only get a few chances to actually get it right. But in this form, it’s really the matter of the moment that is kind of memorialized in a way. And I thought, here we are sitting in front of this piece, and maybe you could take us into it, which I think clearly is about part of what he brings with him once he leaves Eritrea. Once he gets here, once you get to the northeast of America, what do you remember about your

Alexander In a lot of these paintings, and in [Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden] in particular, there is the memory of the compound, the memory of the sacred space of family, the memory of space that was very much touched by his mother’s aesthetic. Zememesh Berhe, a woman of un common grace and of uncommon quotidian fineness. The borders that were embroidered, the colors, the baskets, the way she painted the walls, and the food. I never was able to visit their home there, war and conflict interrupted all of that. But it was something he talked about all the time, and the safety that he felt within the compound, but at the same time, with war always present, with a brother lost to war, sometimes the compound was infiltrated. I think there is this attempt to remember, but again, this is not literally what the walls look like, that’s not literally the shape of the window. If you could look through that win dow, you wouldn’t see that. So that window is a painting unto itself, or a tapestry unto itself. That beautiful sort of weeping willow type thing is also an angel wing that we see in so many of the paintings, reminiscent of growing up with the incredible iconography of the Coptic church, but also, I think, uncannily the angel motif of someone who became an ancestor unexpectedly and too soon.

Alexander What a beautiful question. What an interesting question, because I am an avid dreamer. I was the one who every morning was like, “Guess where I’ve been? Guess what happened?” He would say mostly that he didn’t dream, but then he would go into the studio. What I think is so interesting is that the paintings are not literal, even though there are finely worked representative areas. So many of them are dreamscapes. It was almost like maybe the dreams stayed in pictures. They didn’t come into words. He held them like that. But they came out when he was in his own space, as he was, very, very, devotedly.

homeland?

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And where are we now?

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Moran That brings up something I was asking you earlier, which is about any good partnership: there’s a lot of trading of secrets, and also the craft, the secrets of each other’s craft. He watches you sit at a desk, or wherever you write and generate; you watch him in the kitchen generate, you watch him walk into the studio and generate, and then, sometimes you take some of the craft across the border into a work. You know, like you’re not really supposed to bring that combination of olive oils into your painting. In your book, what did you call him or did he call himself—a conscious...? Alexander Synchretizer.

Alexander Yes. Coming as a refugee, he did so much living and surviving, went to art school, but as a fully grown-up person, had already been a chef and had a restaurant with his brothers, had a family, had children and had been painting all along. But I think that there was something he understood that was very precious about taking what you could as you went, and when you talk about partnership, thinking about this painting [Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden] that we’re in front of, and the magical bottle tree... My parents are from Harlem, USA, I grew up in Washington, DC, didn’t grow up with no bottle trees. But when I learned about the West African and then southern coastal Black tradition of bottle trees, I became obsessed with it and thought it was an extraordinary thing to think that light and color and spirit could be caught. This [painting] is like saying, protect this house, protect the people in it, bless the people in it. [The bottle tree] didn’t belong to me, but I claimed it. And it was from my people. And it didn’t belong to his tradition, but he claimed it. But what I love there is, of course, the bottles are upside down. They’re not on branches. So you take things that you think might be authentic to a tradition, but the beauty of coming together... I would think often and we would talk about how here we were—two Black people born at the same time, two months apart completely on other sides of planet Earth. How did we find each other? I don’t know. And then in bringing all of it together into the mix, it seemed that there was an infinite amount to draw from. I didn’t make pictures. He wrote some [poetry], he was a person of words, but also the home, the family, the children, the relationship, the food, the music and the ideas were a part of living a beautiful life, where things also got made.

Moran Synchretizer. Like a gatherer, a gathering of... you go to art school, they teach you one practice, you go to a music conservatory, they teach you one practice, you go to jour nalism school, they teach you one practice, but he seemed to be about the multiplicity of practice, and did not mind going head over heels into each one of them in a way that you rarely see in other citizens.

Moran I often talk about the constellation, the need for the gap between the stars, the need to imagine the line between them so that you can actually have a vision—oh look, that is a line in the sky. In your house, it felt like that, too. But you always were drawing the line between parenthood, partnership, a writing practice, a cooking practice. In your home, it felt much like how I imagine great institutional spaces can feel like—a real home, where all the communities kind of lie together only in the

16 17 practice of the people who live in the space themselves. One of the first visits we made up to your house in New Haven was for Juneteenth. And Ficre took me into the backyard to show me, like, “This is where I work.” And walking into the space, paintings often seem like they’re of a period of time, and if you could kind of chart that, maybe the era of this work... Alexander That’s a great question. These paintings come from different periods of time. It’s interesting that they feel the same. Now that we’ve had the chance to look at the works with our friends at Lelong... He had turned the garage in the back of the house into a home studio. Then there was the other studio, which was in Erector Square. After he passed away in 2012, we kept the work in that space because it was organized, it was cataloged and we held our breaths for eight years, but it was safe. Finally, we finished getting it out shortly before the pandemic, which feels very fortunate, and then have had very, very powerful times with Lindsay, Mary, Bianca, and Melay looking at the work and putting it into dated order because sometimes he didn’t sign it. Sometimes he didn’t date it. You probably heard us have this argument at some point, because we had it quite regularly, like, “Sell that work, Brother! Why are you keeping these treasures?” But his idea was like, “I’m just making work. Baby, you know, let me make this work.” He had a healthy artist’s ego and sense of vision and sense of self. But I also think that the name itself, and the idea of sole authorship, was not the most important thing to him. We started the process of putting things in chronological order, which I do think is important to understand development. It’s true, a lot of the earlier work is much darker, because for him, his place of resolution was coming into family. And I think that’s also a very interesting thing with you as well—being deeply in family, being deeply in an artistic partnership, as it turns out, is the place where you’re also able to be a very productive Moranartist.Andto be constantly challenged as well, by your partner. [laughs] Alexander [laughs] Constantly challenged! Moran I wanted to ask you about the titles of pieces, which I always think is part of the clue for the viewer. Seated Musician , Red Hats and Balloons, Gate to the Compound... talk about this part of adding language to the Alexanderpiece.That was something that we sometimes did together. And that was very collaborative. Because again, I was always showing him my poems, and we very much had a practice where he would say, come look at the paintings. Once something was done, the naming process was pleasure. Some of the best names were names that we made together, some of the other ones are more literally descriptive. Along with the help of Key Jo Lee, who’s a wonderful art historian; she was a graduate student at Yale at the time, and helped completely catalog and put things in order, and is now at the Cleveland Museum. She said that everything’s got to be called something. So to gether, we went through that process. For something like this, Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden, what it meant to

Moran It makes me think about the exhibition title, Gate to the Blue. What blue means, what it has always meant for us—and also for North Africa—as a healer, a healing color. Also in the time when many musicians, I’m talking about artists now, who can’t reach a public, who can’t reach a kind of freedom that they access through their instrument and meeting people. You’re also supposed to find comfort in this kind of reclusive state. For me, looking at this painting, I’m ready to jump inside it, rather than a thing that we also kind of resist, a kind of aloneness. But over the past seven months, it’s been a thing that even though it’s been with my family, it is a place to feel, like a wall to kind of place your body against. We also think about peo ple who are “inside,” who also can’t get out. What is at the top of the painting?

18 19 have his mother’s name in a painting made after she had passed. I think there are many references, as with anybody. But what I think is really interesting is some of the artists or musicians or things he was obsessed with, you wouldn’t necessarily see. I wouldn’t necessarily say this looks like a [Romare] Bearden. But all of those incredible watercolor-y Bearden gardens are in here. And so Maudell Sleet’s Magic Garden , that Bearden work, is one that’s underneath this one. And some of the other gardens and Morancompounds.Everyone has multiple memories in it, too.

Alexander Before we go to Gate to the Compound, I wanted to take a second at Tis Time to Seek Asylum.

Alexander I can’t quite make out what it is. But I think that’s so interesting to see in this moment. Because of course, there’s also the idea of political asylum, being a refugee and what it means to think of the United States as a safe place, which has gotten so politically distorted and complicated. I love that you mentioned blue as a healing color and I’m thinking about when Albert Murray—who named Bearden’s paintings—talked about the blues as such. Ficre actually did like the US Delta Blues, he listened to a lot of that, but he also was obsessed with Ali Farka Touré. And he also was obsessed with deep blue tones and sounds and notes and gutturals. We were talking earlier about Tigrinya and the shapes in the throat that make it possible. They are very hard to make when you’re a grown-up person if you haven’t come up speaking that way. But the language holds something from inside here, something Moranvisceral.Yes, it does. I was gonna say that thinking about Howlin’ Wolf, thinking about people who also use the stretch of the vocal chord—no, this is my beautiful place in my voice, it’s not the thing to try and clear up for you. But actually, sink it down there, with all the friction of my chords together—do you hear that? We think about Miles Davis, we think about Louis Armstrong, we think about Billie Holiday’s slide of those words. It becomes also the place where it’s fitting for it to sit inside that space. Also, we haven’t talked about how he listened, which is a major part of the practice. How he listened as he makes these works, the kinds of sounds he’s infatuated with, the sounds he brings into his workspace? Hmm, maybe we go to the compound.

Alexander As you said, the gate is open. And inside, there’s not what you would expect. That’s not the family home, but rather, these are much more ancient structures, they would be called vernacular structures. He was very interested in an architectural form called the hidmo. This isn’t exactly the hidmo, but he studied it in the village where his family was from. But then this also, these are pass-throughs. There’s also something that’s sort of like a Roman figure in there. Then you have that factory-like building in the corner which I think is the Bearden plume of Pittsburgh smoke. But what’s happened with the open gate to the compound is that the soldiers have broken in. So that was a motif, something that happened in childhood, that soldiers broke into the compound and his as tonishing mother hid the boys, and she talked the soldiers out, willed them out, got them out. So you see that this space that you want to be safe is also violable. But you’re interested in all of this, the texture, the scraping, the flow ers, the magic, the portal that is not permeable to inside. It’s like a magic window. Then I think that’s our bottle tree, but our bottle tree is bare. The home is not protected, maybe. And then what I think is also really fascinating...

In all of the blues in the Gate to the Blue, that here’s this impossible moat. Here’s this water that is doing an impos sible thing. That has and is what moves me, that this was someone who was making paintings while being a very encompassing and exquisite father... Moran Yeah, those boys... I mean, any child really challenges the path of an artist. Because you have to take them into account. At any moment that you’ve got any free time to make anything, you can’t help but bring their joy or whatever trauma they’re going through in their ten-year-old lives into the work, too, whether you want to or not. Like the Fats Waller dance party that you all came to was actually made for those kids, that they could come to a show and just wild out on the dance floor. And, nobody would get mad. It was actually made for those kids. Then in Ficre’s work, it always seems that there are these places for the boys, [in] what you were pointing out earlier, in his paper hat boat. Yep, these spaces [in his paintings] also offer those places. The reason I bring this up, not just as an artist, but I think also as a viewer, we aren’t supposed to kind of bring our strict interpretation of things. Now I walk into here, and I should see it, but you’re here to let go of all of that, you’re here to stand in front of a work that helps you let go. I also wondered when you were talking about his mother taking a stand, how old was he when this happened?

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Alexander Let’s go to Gate to the Compound. Yeah, so you start. [laughs] Moran [Laughs] I’m glad the gate is open. Well, this is what we started with today. I asked you to walk me through. And also asked about why the exhibition was titled Gate to the Blue. That led us into our conversation about the blues but also... take this technique here. And you started to break this open for us, the forms at the top and the officers there.

Alexander I would think a young teenager, old enough, enough of a young man that there would be the fear that a child, a young man could be conscripted or taken.

Alexander Yes, that attitude of “I’m doing it.” Actually, it’s

They were twelve and thirteen when he died, and he was his whole self with them. But I don’t think so, every story wasn’t shared. Because some stories you don’t share with children. Many, many were. Living with those stories and giving them over in the eight years that have passed has been an interesting thing.

Alexander

Moran

It’s longer than twelve bars. There’s more opportunity here. When you said the impossibility of water, it felt more like the possibility of water, which is our most free form that we have, and a musician always asks that they get to feel more like that, so that they can kind of get inside every part of a sound, of a song, of a chord, of a groove—that water allows that more freely, as a person who sits inside of a groove. So it’s also what this means, when you talk about it as a moat, but it’s also the thing that’s keeping it up, it’s not only trying to fill in the void, but it’s shoring it up too, like, here is the space.

Alexander I love that. I’m thinking about time and the inten sity with which he made these paintings, and a certain kind of simplicity of life. We lived in New Haven, we lived in our home, the studio was, either in the backyard or it was a mile away. I taught a mile away, the kids went to school a couple blocks away, you remember walking over to the house. Things had a certain simplicity which made for lots and lots and lots of time to work. I think about even the days, I miss those days, like the days when we became friends, where a stranger emailed a stranger and said, “Y’all want to come over for Juneteenth”—we had never had a Juneteenth party before. But we said, “Well, we’re gonna make new friends. Let’s have a Juneteenth party.” [both laughing]

Moran And these pieces... they end up becoming like the journal. For them and for everyone else to be able to address themselves. I guess when people hopefully get to visit the show, they’ll see how and what the narrative of this is. That long form blues.

Alexander Yeah, long form blues. I like that. I like that.

Moran Did he talk about that with his sons?

Moran That’s also a very parent thing to do. These kids cannot be my life.

Moran They were. They were, and the passage of time for artists who work in a space... I also really am curious about the playlists people bring into the space that they create with. Musicians often talk about documenting the time. Some people were famous for making seven records in a year and a half. Was there a kind of rapid entry to the studio with a new body of work that people were producing? Thinking about Ficre, in his mind he probably went, okay, I have all of this stuff to do in this twenty-four-hour period. But also, I have to make space and time to do this, to make sure that it’s documented this way. I really think of it as a journal practice, continuing to keep it there. Resisting the urge of getting to it later.

Alexander But those days were long.

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Moran Here we are at Seated Musician with Feathered Wing. We were talking about the diptychs earlier, finding one and not knowing that there was a bottom half. I always asked these questions about diptychs and about how the artist imagined them in the first place. Is this a stanza break? What does it mean to break something into two or to consider it one? The form always has that in it.

Alexander What I think is really interesting about the diptychs is that if he’d wanted this not to have this stanza break, then he might have made it align absolutely precisely. But there’s just that little bit of torque, there’s that bit of light, that bit of energy, that bit of unreconciled self, that bit of, not tidying it up, though, it’s a very carefully made work. I think, in making art, certainly in poems, the poems that tie up tidily at the end are usually not the best ones, so sometimes I would say, back when I taught poems, just chop off the end, torque it, open it, and see how you get an energy, a life force. This is a great comfort to me, but it’s very powerful to me, this is DNA, this is made by a living creature. This is something with breath in it. These paintings are so amazing in the big room but when you look up close, you think about someone making and detailing. And then, this drum. At our wedding, there was a kind of blue, turquoise can that’s made into the drum. A very particular turquoise that goes around the neck and it’s hit with a stick. I like that in so many of these paintings there are Eritrean instruments, all of which he played. Did he ever play the krar [for you]? That little kind of lyre, that’s in one of the paintings, but he could play that very nicely, and thought they were beautiful objects and sometimes he would paint instruments.

The first question is from Professor Gates, who asked if Ficre would be happy to be taught in a course on African American artists or African artists, or both?

Alexander Superb question. Ficre lived in New Haven, Connecticut longer than he lived anywhere. Before he came to the United States, via Sudan, Italy, and Germany, US Black culture was very much in his imagination. Some of it was through having older sisters; one of his sisters, Mehret, went to Hampton, and learned a lot about Black soul sounds from the 70s as part of the records, and I was telling Jason, there are these turntable paintings, he was really interested in records, and the records also that his even older siblings used to play. Sam Cooke, “Let’s Twist Again,” they would dance to that kind of music and to Angela Davis and her politics. James Brown and Bob

24 25 interesting when you look at the span of time in which the work was made. Like with any artist, any musician, any poet, there are different stages. I always like that in teaching. If I’m teaching writing, I say, “Now go listen to everything, which musicians do you love the most? Listen to every single thing they recorded. Everything.” Or, “What artist do you love? Go look at an entire retrospec tive. Learn one artist not in your art form, from beginning to end.” Because then what you will see is it’s not like, “I make a painting every six weeks.” Then you can see people obsessively trying to work something out, stuck in a groove. Coming back to how you hear it in musicians like oh, yeah, that riff, heard that before, but you’re working something out.

Mary Sabbatino

26 27 Marley, all of these Black American and diasporic figures. He belonged with them in his imagination, even when he was a child in Eritrea. What I found amazing was that all of these Blacknesses were true at the same time. He would never not be Asmarino, someone from Asmara, someone from Eritrea, someone from East Africa. That’s the deep ancestral self. But he became a Black man living in New Haven, Connecticut, with a super Black wife and Black children, but all of it true at once. The answer to the lovely question is to be African American is many, many, many different things. To be diasporically Black is many different things. To be African is so many different things. To be East African is so many different things. I think all the contexts work.

Sabbatino Second question. Someone asked if you could speak about his relationship to boats? Alexander There are all kinds of boats in this show. The painting titled Red Hats with Balloons depicts what I would call magical boats, boats with balloons, with these beautiful creatures in it. Then we talked about the paper hat toy boat in Gate to the Compound. There are two instances of paintings named after the Amistad ship, that ship with stolen West Africans that grounded in New Haven where the famous trial took place. We were both obsessed with the Amistad. We lived in New Haven and we knew that the captives were let out on the New Haven green for their exercise. The famous trial took place there, I wrote an epic poem about the Amistad and a replica of the Amistad came back to live in New Haven, when we were there in the early 2000s. So the Amistad ship, and the idea of the Middle Passage... Black people who he identified with had been stolen and brought to this place where he now lived, there’s that idea of the boat.

In the Boat at Night, it’s interesting, because I think those structures in the background look like what we see in some of his earlier paintings. Those paintings were made out of his time teaching in a warzone in Eritrea, but that boat would not have been there. He was not someone who grew up around water, he was not someone who was an avid swimmer, he was a highlander. The boats are real, the boats are historical, the boats are invented. They’re all of those different things. If we look at the reflected boats, for example, Boat, they are very beautiful. Then there were boats that he painted and saw in New England, in Maine and in New Haven. But what I think is inter esting in Boat is that there is no boat that I know of that is colored or shaped like that. It’s reflecting in the water differently. It has a sort of basket-ness to it and he was very interested in those shapes, which I think he borrowed from other vessels and figures. We’re standing in front of Mangia Libro, a good place to end. Mangia libro was Ficre’s childhood nickname. It means book-eater. To the most curious, learned, fascinat ing, beautiful, soulful treasure of a human being I have ever met. That is him in this dream world, and we are in this dream world too. This conversation has been edited and condensed. To listen to the full conversation, please visit our website.

Elizabeth Alexander—poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate—is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education.

Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. She is a Chancel lor of the Academy of American Poets, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund. Notably, Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, and is author or co-author of fourteen books. Her book of poems, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2015. Pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran hails from Houston, Texas. He studied with Jaki Byard at the Manhattan School of Music and with Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams upon graduation. Moran’s 18year relationship with Blue Note Records produced 9 highly acclaimed recordings. His groundbreaking trio, The Bandwagon (with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits) is currently celebrating their 20th anniversary. Recent awards and fellowships include the MacArthur Foundation, US Artists; Doris Duke Foundation; and Ford Foundation. Moran collaborated with his wife, the mezzo-soprano/composer Alicia Hall Moran, as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial (BLEED); 2015 Venice Biennial (Work Songs); and at the Carnegie Hall (Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration). Since his first al bum, he has produced fourteen additional albums, created scores for Ava DuVernay’s films Selma and 13th, and author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ staged and upcoming film adaptation of Between the World and Me. In 2018, Moran’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Moran is current ly the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center, teaches at New England Conservatory and curates the Artist’s Studio series for Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

painted possibility. Throughout his canvases is a consistent preoccupation with gates and passageways, windows and frames, portals and thresh olds. Beyond these entrances and exits lay the possibility of new worlds, allowing viewers to reimagine notions of home and foreign lands; history and memory; self and other. That Ghebreyesus could hold distinctions between such disparate ideas while recognizing their interdependence was among the many skills of the accomplished painter, musician, and chef, whose clarity of vision and acuity in artistic reinvention proved indispensable as he traversed borders and defied disciplines. Today, Ghebreyesus’s paintings, with their blend of the personal and political, posthumously unite new and diverse audiences in shared appreciation for the artist’s evocative renderings of arduous journeys and distant dreams. His artistic output, which was inextricable from the rich life he lived, wove diasporic history with a cosmopolitan vision. Ghebreyesus’s worldly approach emerged from a life spent as a “conscious synchretizer,” a term the artist coined in reference to his method of amalgamating the visual cues from traditions as diverse as Christian iconography and Islamic architecture. Combined with the stirrings of his own imagination, Ghebreyesus’s syncretism produced new and astonishing forms. 1

“Through the Gate and Into the World: Ficre Ghebreyesus and the Painting of Global Diaspora” by Tausif Noor August Ficre2021Ghebreyesus

Indeed,diaspora.the vertiginous patterning seen on the un stretched, amorphous canvas of Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden recalls the monumental sculptures of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Anatsui’s sculptures, constructed from copper wire, colorful paper labels, salvaged caps from liquor bottles, and discarded aluminum printer plates—items transformed by and for their use as circulated commodities—are pinned on walls, allowing their undulating folds to sparkle. Many of these works, such as Ink Splash II (2012), draw inspiration from the strip-woven ceremonial textiles of the Ewe and Asante people, evincing Anatsui’s deftness in producing what the art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu has termed “metamorphic objects, sculptures that by their infinitely re configurable, fragmentary form, instantiate the popular African maxim: ‘no condition is permanent.’”4

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No condition is permanent. These four words capture the experience of diaspora in the twentieth century, as thousands upon thousands of individuals were uprooted from their lands of birth, shunted through the world by the ravages of war and inequities of capitalism that underpin globalization. Impermanence defined Ghebreyesus and his youth, fueling his art for years to come. In 1978, at his mother’s urging, sixteen-year-old Ghebreyesus left home and set out on foot. This journey

2 Referencing Ghebreyesus’s mother and his childhood home, the work’s central feature is a large door. Decorated with delicate vines, the door both invites and withholds, simultaneously beckoning viewers to consider what lies beyond and protecting the family compound from the violence of the external world. On the left side of the canvas is a tree heavily laden with colorful glass bottles, alluding to an apotropa ic tradition that can be seen both in Africa and in the American Southern coastal diaspora, underscoring the work’s theme of protection. Across the length of Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden are colorful, vertically stacked tiles, some of which are inscribed with images of flowers. These components— variegated colors and patterns that amalgamate into a unified whole—mirror the strategic essentialism of Pan-African textiles popularized in the 1950s and ’60s, as independence movements swept across the continent.3 Differing in the specific source of their origin yet resolutely announcing the distinctiveness of their heritage, these designs continue to be a source of pride for Africans around the world; they demonstrate that celebrating one’s national traditions need not come at the expense of drawing wider connections across histories of colonialism and violence—an idea that is central to the work of Ghebreyesus and his artist peers in the

Ghebreyesus was born to a Coptic Christian family in the Eritrean capital of Asmara in 1962, the year after his nation’s war for independence from Ethiopia be gan. Memories of Asmara would prove fertile material for Ghebreyesus’s practice, supplying his paintings with a materiality grounded in tradition, and ethereal, sensuous scenes furnished by his own wandering dreams. Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden (2002), a massive, unstretched canvas, exemplifies the duality of Ghebreyesus’s approach.

34 35 would lead him through Sudan, Italy, and then Germany over the course of the next three years. The artist encountered many obstacles: the rigid strictures of im migration and resettlement policies; the racist, spir it-crushing discrimination that he suffered in Europe; the aching sense of drifting through endless terrains, far from loved ones and without the grounding of a stable home. It was not until 1981 that Ghebreyesus would fi nally arrive as a refugee to the United States, where he would remain until his death in 2012.

Many of Ghebreyesus’s works reference the tumult of forced migration. Recurring motifs of boats, depicting both real and imagined journeys undertaken by the artist, can be found in the artist’s oeuvre in paintings such as Boat at Night (c. 2002–7) and Red Hats and Balloons (c. 2002–7). Boat (c. 2002–7), one in a series of paint ings Ghebreyesus made of the titular vessels afloat on water, is a meditation on the double-edged knife of freedom. Ghebreyesus conscientiously depicts boats from two perspectives—first from above, in which they are regarded as vessels with which to escape from the perilous conditions of war; and second, as seen from below, reflected in the cool shades of ultramarine and turquoise water. This doubling, reflective perspectival shift shows the underside of the pursuit of freedom, a pursuit with risks of danger and death—a grave knowledge held by refugees, who are all too familiar with calculating risk and possibility. In rendering the boats with familiar patterns of vertical stripes that echo Pan-African tex tiles, Ghebreyesus suggests that the boat signifies both freedom and danger. On a similar note, Tis Time to El Anatsui, Splash II, 2012. Aluminum and copper, 112 × 146 inches.

Ink

Over the next decade, Ghebreyesus lived up to the ambitions he outlined, melding personal experiences and collective histories to expand his practice. His exqui site treatment of color—readily visible in the mélange of charcoal gray, white and blue which forms the body of water in Boat at Night—reaches apotheosis in works such as Gate to the Compound (2006). In this painting, Ghebreyesus revisits the door as a protective force. But rather than depict a door shut against the world, the artist renders it open, revealing hidmo architecture and a small cluster of people gathered around a car. If, previ ously, the gate separating his family compound served a protective function, then, as Elizabeth Alexander excellently interprets, it also was a portal that was violable,

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Seek Asylum (c. 2007–11), a small canvas made in acrylic, forcefully conveys migration’s brutal complexities. The title of the painting is emblazoned on a door which bottom outer edge is banded by a thin line of yellow as if letting in a crack of light; it’s a glimmer of hope—the resource so scarce but so undeniably essential for those undertaking treacherous passages in search of a new life.

Faint as it may have been, that flicker of hope kept Ghebreyesus afloat throughout his years in America, where he worked to build a stable base for himself, attending university in Connecticut and studying art on a full scholarship at the Art Students’ League of New York. But the prospect of becoming a full-time, self-supporting artist was temporarily put on hold in 1992, when Ghebreyesus was persuaded by his brothers Gideon and Sahle, who had also come to the United States as refugees, to open an Eritrean restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. The restaurant, Caffé Adulis, was praised by the New York Times in 1999 for the complexity and subtlety of its food. Head chef Ficre Ghebreyesus argued that this culinary intricacy stemmed from the way “food ideas move around the world very quickly,” exchanging flavors in new combinations as the diaspora themselves Throughoutcirculated.5 this time, Ghebreyesus continued to paint, decorating the walls of Caffé Adulis with his resplendent imagery. In 2000, he was admitted to the MFA program in painting at Yale University. The artistic statement Ghebreyesus supplied as part of his application materials describes his diverse, combinatory approach to art. His work as a chef, the religious imagery of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and his love for African American blues and jazz music each contributed to his paintings. It was the sensibilities of these different practices—impro visation, balance, harmony, rhythm—rather than direct references which made their way into Ghebreyesus’s visual art. Applying strategies and techniques of recom bination and amalgamation to his own experiences as a refugee, Ghebreyesus was able to adopt new perspectives on his life, which was always the first and most in-depth source of his art. “I am continually recontextualizing my normative experiences in early Eritrea,” wrote Ghebreyesus in his Yale MFA application. “It is time, at last, for me to dedicate myself to painting, to distill this lifetime of visual and emotional experience, and to learn how to live up to my potential as a painter and better share my particular vision with others.”

8 Acknowledging the historical lineage of cultural exchange from Africa to the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, Mercer notes, allows us to better make sense of how visual culture operates in the Black diaspora under contemporary conditions of globalization. This is

38 39 subject to entrances by soldiers that Ghebreyesus remembers his mother keeping at bay from her young Thechildren.7possibility for the unknown to exit and enter one’s life was a subject that Ghebreyesus rendered with great nuance. Gate to the Compound’s composition is delin eated into distinct planar sections by the horizontal expanse of the gate that stretches across the canvas. Beyond this barrier, Ghebreyesus has included a scene of figures huddled around a pickup truck near the hidmo architecture. Rendered in one-point perspective to indi cate their distance from the viewer while simultaneously suggesting their possible future proximity, the figures— and the world that stretches behind them in the far right corner of the canvas—materialize the uncertainty that Ghebreyesus and his family experienced during the war. Gate to the Blue (c. 2002–7) continues this gradated approach, juxtaposing aqua, turquoise, cerulean and teal. This mix of colors forms a richly textured ocean, bor dered by a band of stacked, multicolored squares that together once more evoke strip-woven Pan-African textiles. Here, the artist has elected not to ground us in familiar, stable architecture; instead, he gives us the unmooring and transportive qualities of water, and, by extension the sky, bridges between those who stay and those who go. Though virtuosic renderings of water affirm Ghebreyesus’s technical talents, they also gesture to the artist’s concern for and deep historical understanding of the linkages between the African and African American diasporas. The violent legacy of slavery—how it ruptured families and discarded countless lives, how it broke the will and froze the imagination—manifests in paintings such as Middle Passage with Solitary Figures (c. 2002–7), Horizon with Interred Figures (c. 2002–7) and La Amistad (2002), which references the Spanish ship from which captive slaves revolted and escaped in 1839. In Nkisi (2011)—the title of which references a set of West African spiritual practices brought to the New World—the artist depicts a large figure, who, in a nod to Coptic Christian faith, dons a barely visible blue cross necklace; this figure looms protectively over smaller humanoid figures pinned by bent nails below. The blend of olive and brown acrylic washes which compose the figure’s face—along with the discrete horizontal sections of the painting, with their variations of light colors and patterned design inscribed onto thick impasto— demonstrates Ghebreyesus’s facility with melding iconography, spirituality, and history. These fictive scenes—rooted in real events—signal the artist’s urge to connect his own narrative of displacement with conjunctural histories of diaspora. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s theories of multiculturalism, art historian Kobena Mercer describes this kind of move as both a unifying concern for Black diaspora artists since the 1980s and essential to the genealogy of modernism.

40 41 certainly the case for Ficre Ghebreyesus, who was deeply moved by Black American cultural production, particularly in the field of music, while growing up in Eritrea. Thanks to his older siblings, Ghebreyesus grew to ap preciate 1970s Black soul music, and was attentive to the cultural and political force of figures such as Angela Davis, Bob Marley, and James Brown that played on the Black diasporic imagination.9

Ghebreyesus’s musical inclinations can be readily discerned in paintings such as Seated Musician IV (2011), Seated Musician With Feathered Wing (2011), and Angel and Musician (2011), portraits that draw heavily from Coptic imagery and depict figures with traditional instruments such as the lyre-like krar, which Ghebreyesus himself was skilled in playing. Both Seated Musician With Feathered Wing and Angel and Musician are diptychs whose kaleidoscopic, fractured components coalesce into portraits of individual men visited by heavenly spirits, transported by ecstatic rhythm into an otherworldly realm. Here, Ghebreyesus visualizes music’s capacity to open portals, transporting the physical self to spiritual, sensuous heights.

The composition recalls Indian modernist Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003). In paintings such as You Can’t Please All (1981), Khakhar combined modernist, often surrealist painting techniques with vernacular forms culled from his observations of life in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay in post-Independence India. The art historian Sonal Khullar has noted how Khakhar’s imagin ing of himself within the city and the new nation is re flective of the “affiliative” quality of global modernisms, where matters of difference and identification can be held in tension without flattening their histories, allowing “spatial, temporal, conceptual, and material diver gences between artistic practices and movements across the globe.”

10 In drawing comparisons between the cosmopolitan leanings of Ghebreyesus and others from the Global South, the very notion of the “global,” not just as a system of economic trade under globalization, but as a condition that suffuses all forms of cultural engagement, comes into

Ghebreyesus’s self-portrait, Mangia Libro (2007), continues in the theme of ecstatic transportation; its Italian title, which translates to “book-eater,” was a childhood nickname, underscoring an early education cut short by war. The image depicts a small figure im mersed in a book, occupying a thick, vegetal landscape, gnarled with vines and trees. Small, geometric buildings are rendered with muddied blues, mauves, and greens.

Experiencesrelief.ofdisplacement and reinvention impressed upon Ghebreyesus that the self is an open, fluid concept, subject to external influence and propelled by internal reflection, as suggested by Untitled (c. 2002–7). At the center of the composition stands a singular, naked male figure, surrounded by swirls of pale color that envelop him in a kind of mandorla. Inscribed along the edges are notes that seem like personal reminders to himself, (“Extend by this much for a golden section”) as well as instructions for how to read the painting (clockwise, to spell SELF).

1 Ficre Ghebreyesus, “Artistic Statement,” in application to Yale School of Art, 2000. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

4 Chika O. Okeke-Agulu, “El Anatsui - Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture” (Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, September 16, 2020), 329ed175bae/1599585840071/El+Anatsui+Essay+by+Chika+O+Okeke-Agulu_static1.squarespace.com/static/542af685e4b092d99a110827/t/5f57be2c92169https://Skowhegan+AD2020.pdf.

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2 Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, “Conversation and Virtual Toast with Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran,” in Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue, pp. 11–28: 11.

Bhupen Khakhar, You Can’t Please All, 1981. Oil paint on canvas, 69 × 69 inches.

3 Elizabeth Harney, “The Ecole de Dakar: Pan Africanism in Paint and Textile,” African Arts, Autumn 2002, 13-32.

6 Ficre Ghebreyesus, “Artistic Statement.”

Ghebreyesus’s paintings recognize that a single life is composed of the experiences, memories, and perspectives that one has gathered, intentionally or not, from a multitude of sources, some of which cannot be easily pinned down or delimited by the boundaries of nation, ethnicity, or identity. Ficre Ghebreyesus, a conscious synchretizer of extraordinary talent, rejected such lim itations in his life and in his art. He instead elected to open himself to the world’s possibilities without losing a sense for the histories that he and others in the diaspora were shaped by. An artist who witnessed firsthand the harsh realities of shuttered opportunities as a refugee and migrant, Ghebreyesus found in painting the ability to create his own freedom—a freedom that we are able to revel in, through his talents, today.

5 Ficre Ghebreyesus, quoted in R.W. Apple Jr. “A Culinary Journey Out of Africa Into New Haven,” The New York Times, February 24, 1999. Accessedcom/1999/02/24/dining/a-culinary-journey-out-of-africa-into-new-haven.html<https://www.nytimes.>7August2021.

44 45 7

Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art history. His criticism can be found in venues such as Artforum, The New York Times, frieze, The Nation, ArtAsiaPacific, and The White Re view, as well as in various artist catalogues and edited volumes.

“Conversation and Virtual Toast with Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran,” 20. 8 Kobena Mercer, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016: 215-16. “Conversation and Virtual Toast with Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran,” 25–26. Sonal Khullar, “Affiliation, Worldliness, and Modernism,” in Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 1-40:15.

Exhibition images Ficre Ghebreyesus, Gate to the Blue, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, September 10 – October 24, 2020

63 Gate to the Blue, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm) Collection of Laurie M. Tisch

64 65 Boat at Night, c. 2002–07 Oil on canvas 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm) Collection of Jonathan A. Olsoff and Sophie de Bellissen Tis Time to Seek Asylum, c. 2007–11 Acrylic on canvas 14 × 18 inches (35.6 × 45.7 cm) Private Collection

66 67 Untitled, c.2002-07 Acrylic on canvas 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm) Private Collection La Amistad, c.2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm) Private Collection, Bethesda, Maryland

68 69 Angel and Musician, c.2011 Acrylic on canvas Diptych; each: 24 × 48 inches (60.9 × 121.9 cm) Private Collection, New York, New York Seated Musician VI, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 48 × 24 inches (121.9 × 61 cm) Private Collection, Switzerland

70 71 Red Hats and Balloons, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 18 × 24 inches (45.7 × 61 cm) Private Collection Mangia Libro, c. 2007 Acrylic on canvas 54.25 × 48.1 inches (137.8 × 122.2 cm) Private Collection

72 73 Seated Musician with Feathered Wing, 2011 Acrylic on canvas Diptych; each: 24 × 48 inches (61 × 121.9 cm) Private Collection Bent Tree, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 30 × 24 inches (76.2 × 61 cm)

74 75 Middle Passage Figures with Solitary Boats, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 24 × 30 inches (61 × 76.2 cm) Nkisi / Middle Passage, c. 2003 Acrylic on canvas 48 × 52.2 inches (121.9 × 132.6 cm)

76 77 Boat, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 14 × 18 inches (35.6 × 45.7 cm) Collection of Regan Rohde Friedmann, Palm Beach, Florida Horizon with Interred Figures, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 27.9 cm) Collection of William Goodman and Victoria Belco, Berkeley, California

78 Untitled, c.2002-07 Acrylic on canvas 22 × 28 inches (55.9 × 71.1 cm) Collection of Suzanne McFayden

80 81 Untitled, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 6 × 4 inches (15.2 × 10.2 cm) Private Collection Kite, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 7 × 5 inches (17.8 × 12.7 cm) Private Collection, Switzerland

82 83 Bird, c. 2011 Acrylic on canvas 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8 cm) Private Collection, Switzerland Untitled (Window), c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 7 × 5 inches (17.8 × 12.7 cm) Collection of Susan Sawyer and Michael Kaplan, New Haven, Connecticut

Works in public collections

86 87 Seated Musician X, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 30.1 × 24 inches (76.5 × 61 cm) Collection of The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Seated Musician III, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 48 × 24 inches (121.9 × 61 cm) Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Elizabeth Alexander 2019.31

88 89 Shepherd, c. 2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 48 × 52.1 inches (121.9 × 132.3 cm) The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art Red Room, c.2007 Acrylic on canvas 72 × 84 inches (182.9 × 213.4 cm) The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2021.15.

90 91 Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, c.2002–07 Acrylic on canvas 40.25 × 40.25 inches (102.2 × 102.2 cm) The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut Dudley and Michael Del Balso, B.A. 1966, Contemporary Art Endowment Fund 2021.26.1 Gate to the Compound, 2006 Acrylic on canvas 48.25 × 48.25 inches (122.6 × 122.6 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2022

92 93 Zememesh Berhe’s Magic Garden, c. 2002 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 95 × 190 inches (241.3 × 482.6 cm) Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

2022 Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, France

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

POLYCHROMASIA: Selected Paintings by Ficre Ghebreyesus. New Haven, Connecticut: Artspace, 2013. Asega,DOCUMENTARIESSalome,Imani Dennison, Melay Araya et al. The African Sublime of Ficre Ghebreyesus, 2018.

1992 Black History Month, Ikenga Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

2022

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

94 95

2020

2002AWARDS

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Recent Acquisitions, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut 2021 Now Is The Time: Recent Acquisitions to the Contemporary Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland

The Place as Metaphor, Collection Conversations, Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida

The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

2002

Ficre Ghebreyesus Born 1962 in Asmara, Eritrea Died 2012 in New Haven, Connecticut MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002 BA, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1987

Carol Schlossberg Prize for Excellence in Painting, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut 1992 Best Painting Prize for John Hultberg studio, New York University School of Continuing Education, New York, New York

2013 Ficre Ghebreyesus: Polychromasia, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut 1997 Cannon Office Building, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. 1995 Day Life Savings Time, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut Photographs, Paintings, Prints, Drawings, Africa World Press, Trenton, New Jersey

Talent Scholarship for Full Time Study, The Art Students League of New York 1991 Red Seal Award, The Art Students League of New York

2020 Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, New York

The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida

1991 Time and Place, Cinque Gallery, New York, New York

The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

2006

2018 Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California

The Milk of Dreams, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy

Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, New York (online)

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 2019 Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California City-wide Open Studios, New Haven, Connecticut Thesis Show, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut 2001 First-Year Painting Exhibition, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut 1999 Harvard University School of Education Conference on Eritrea and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Alexander,MONOGRAPHSElizabeth, Julie Mehretu, Emily Kuhlmann, and Lowery Stokes Sims. Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through. San Francisco, California: Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), 2019. Alexander, Elizabeth, Key Jo Lee, Anne Higonnet, Robert Farris Thompson, and Ficre Ghebreyesus.

97 Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue Galerie Lelong & Co., New York September 10 – October 24, 2020 Published by Galerie Lelong & Co. 528 West 26th Street New York, New York 10001 Tel +1 212 315 0470 Fax +1 212 262 FrontLindsayPublicationCopyediting:Design:www.galerielelong.comart@galerielelong.com0624FranklinVandiverCharlieMarkbreitermanagers:DanckwerthandGraceHongandbackcover:FicreGhebreyesus, Gate to the Blue, c. 2002–07 © 2021 Galerie Lelong & Co., New York Conversation and Virtual Toast © Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran Essay © Tausif Noor All works © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus, courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, unless otherwise noted All photos: Christopher Burke Studio, unless otherwise noted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher. pp. 34 © El Anatsui. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Tate. pp. Copyright42 courtesy Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London and Tate London. Photo: Tate. ISBN: 978-0-9671747-4-7