Hear Internationally Acclaimed Ethiopian Artist
Wosene Worke Kosrof
The KINGSLEY ART CLUB is excited to present Wosene Worke Kosrof for our November lecture.
Read on to find out all the details.
Please note All lectures start at 1:30 pm, at the
Crocker Art Museum Auditorium,216 O Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
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Wednesday, November 20th: Wosene Worke Kosrof
Born in 1950 in the Arat Kilo district of Addis Ababa, Wosene Worke Kosrof is a contemporary artist who has achieved international acclaim. Formally trained at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts, he completed a BFA with distinction in 1972. Then, as a Ford Foundation Talent Scholar, he was awarded an MFA in 1980 from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Over the past four decades, Wosene (his professional name) has created an internationally recognized artistic signature in his work by being the first contemporary Ethiopian-born artist to use the script forms — fiedel — of his native Amharic as a core element in his paintings and sculptures.
The very nature of Wosene’s work — his visual vocabulary, his “mapping” of cultures across time and place, his sensual use of form and color — testifies to the visual power and versatility of language. “I create a visible, interactive surface — like visual icons that are accessible to everyone. My paintings invite viewers to dialogue with them, to take them into their memory.”
Wosene lives and has his studio in Berkeley, California.
| Wosene states:
“I am the first Ethiopian-born painter to transform Amharic script into contemporary abstract art… During the past thirty-five years, I’ve produced five major series of paintings in which I have defined an ‘aesthetics of script’: Graffiti Magic (1980-1987); Africa: The New Alphabet (1988-1994); Color of Words (1995-2003); Words: From Spoken to Seen (2004-2008); and, in my current series WordPlay (2009-present), painting has become an intense process of ‘dialoguing’ with the script images, exploring the versatility and playfulness of their surfaces and interiors, dissecting their ‘skeletal’ structures, observing the way they move, interact, and intersect. I elongate, distort, invert, dissect, and recombine their shapes and volumes, and turn them inside out to discover their moods, tempers, and personalities. On canvas, the script images are divested of their literal meanings to become gesture, dance, music, movement, and stories of the human drama.” |
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Mark your calendar now:
Lecture 4: Oliver Lee Jackson
Wednesday, January 15th, 2025
1:30 pm
Plus more in the new year!
All at the Crocker Art Museum
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