A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal

Lawrence, KS - On the crowded streets of Senegal's capital, Dakar, the image of one man can be found nearly everywhere: on the sides of vehicles, gracing the walls of businesses and homes, sanctifying places of prayer, and overlooking the toil of workers. He is saint, poet, and mystic Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the spiritual leader of four million Muslims in Senegal and thousands more around the globe.

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal - on view at the Spencer Museum of Art from Feb. 17 through May 20 - is the first major U.S. exhibition dedicated to Senegal, and the first to introduce audiences to the striking range of 20th-century Mouride arts. These include numerous portraits of Bamba in many media, large-scale popular murals and signs, intricate glass paintings, healing verses inscribed in stunning calligraphic styles, colorful textiles, and paintings by internationally recognized contemporary artists.

Bamba was a Sufi, or Muslim mystic, who resisted French colonial oppression through pacifism. An influential Senegalese Sufi movement called the Mouride Way is grounded in his teachings about the dignity and sanctity of work. Mouridism is one of four Sufi movements in Senegal, and is one of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary Senegalese social life. Sufism is thought of as the mystical core of Islam, and the abundant images of Bamba convey the Saint's blessings to his followers.

Though little known in the United States, Mouridism is a pervasive, positive influence in Senegal that contributes to the country's striking stability. The dynamic works of art in A Saint in the City, coupled with insights into Mouridism from the artists - whose words are written on the walls and heard on videos playing throughout the galleries - attest to the vibrancy of this artistic movement in Senegal and the devotion of those who create and appreciate these works.

The exhibition includes images of lively murals by graffitist Papisto, a leading figure in the late 1980's youth movement known as Set-Setal. Inspired by a song about dignity, propriety, and cleanliness of the soul by famed Senegalese world musician Youssou N'Dour, thousands of youths took to the streets to protest lack of jobs. This dramatic demonstration was not a riot, but instead an effort to beautify public spaces by collecting trash and painting walls with icons of popular culture and Sufi saints. Street names were changed, colonial monuments replaced, and soon Dakar was pulsating with wall murals like those on display.

A Saint in the City also traces the heritage of Islam in Africa, which dates to the eighth century CE, a mere 100 years after the death of Muhammad. Glass paintings by Mouride artists depict the shared stories of Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, and the sacrifice of Abraham, while objects such as talismans, articles of dress and adornment, and shrine pieces show the harmonious ways that Islamic precepts are interwoven with local forms and customs elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

Visitors also can explore depictions of the life and words of Bamba, his descendants, and his followers. Though only a single photograph of the Saint exists (taken in 1913 while he was under house arrest by colonial authorities), it has proved the catalyst for a remarkable proliferation of portraiture and other imagery in Senegal over the past 20 years.

For instance, one wall displays images of the Saint in every imaginable medium - lithographs, posters, silk-screened banners, plaster plaques, photocopies, sand paintings, and even an inked image on cuttlefish bone. There is also small room recreating the devotional sanctum of a holy man whose home in Dakar is laden with sacred imagery.

A Saint in the City also includes a gallery that recreates a typical Senegalese urban street scene, brimming with signs and stands and featuring a pair of seven-foot-tall doors painted with Bamba's image that were donated to the exhibition by a restaurant in Dakar. The mystical potency for Sufis of letters, words, and writings is examined via objects such as prayer boards, papers, and clothing, while another area is devoted to the striking patchwork garments worn by some Mourides.

The exhibition also showcases the works of internationally-exhibited contemporary artists who have been inspired by Mouride precepts. Moussa Tine's assemblages evoke solidarity and the uplifting joys of faith. Chalys Leye's deep-brown canvases are inscribed with codes and mystical devices evocative of the healing practices of Mouride mystics. Viyé Diba's canvases in the earthtones of arid Africa and his sculpture "Musical Materiality" elegantly suggest the weight of responsibility.

The outstanding musical contributions of Mourides infuse the galleries with sound, including songs by Senegalese musicians Youssou N'Dour and Cheikh Lo; "zikrs" (songs of remembrance); women's devotional singing based on lyrics by well-known Mouride female vocalist Fatou Guewel; and Orchestre Baobab.

A Saint in the City celebrates the power of images in the everyday lives of Senegalese people, and demonstrates how these images are reshaping urban environments to express the vitality of contemporary African life. The Mouride arts on view invite visitors to explore one of the many faces of Islam through a culture of peace, hard work, and steadfast devotion.

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal was organized and produced by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and curated by Dr. Mary Nooter Roberts and Dr. Allen F. Roberts in collaboration with Senegalese community leaders and artists in both Dakar and Los Angeles. It was made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities. Additional support was provided by the UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center.

The Spencer Museum of Art venue is supported in part by the Breidenthal-Snyder Foundation, Dave and Gunda Hiebert, and the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal
Los Angeles Times
Christopher Knight
March 4, 2003

Los Angeles-Never underestimate the power of a photograph.

That includes photographs made for no aesthetic purpose, conventional or otherwise. Sometimes an ordinary snapshot that, under different conditions, wouldn't generate a second glance can give birth to an entire system of visual culture that both describes and embodies a way of life.

Such a photograph is at the center of "A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal," a large and often fascinating exhibition at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Organized by Allen F. and Mary Nooter Roberts, UCLA professor and Fowler deputy director, respectively, the show is said to be the first ever in the United States to examine the visual culture of Islamic Senegal.

In 1913, a photographer whose identity is lost to us today took an unrefined picture of a Muslim holy man. The negative, like the name of the anonymous shutterbug, has disappeared. But the image has since become the basis for untold thousands of paintings on everything from hand-held panes of glass to vast city walls. First published in 1917 in a French book on Senegalese Islam, it has also inspired countless carvings, calligraphic displays, photocopies, plaster reliefs, shirts, pamphlet covers, metal plaques, postcards, lapel buttons, decals, tape cassette covers -- virtually anything in the modern world that can carry a picture.

The holy man is Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), and the book's photographic reproduction is his only known portrait made from life. It was taken when Bamba, then 60, was under house arrest by the French colonial government, following 11 years of exile in Gabon and Mauritania. Given the picture's coarseness, it's doubtful that the photographer was a professional. The full-length figure is shown standing on sandy soil in front of a wood-slatted mosque, his body turned slightly to his right. He faces the lens directly.

The image is downright spectral, thanks to the light of the African sun coming from the upper right, over the photographer's shoulder. Stark contrasts of shade and brightness delineate the black-and-white picture.

Bamba squints, but his eyes are obscured. His white robes flatten out against the dark background. A long white scarf wraps around his head and, thrown over his left shoulder, it hides his mouth. No hands emerge from the robe's long sleeves, and only his left ankle and a bit of a sandal are glimpsed at the bottom; there, the saint's shadow forms a dark puddle.

The photograph creates a virtual apparition -- and what better way to represent the founder of a mystical sect than that? It plants one foot in the material world, the other in a metaphysical realm.

Bamba is the patron saint of the Mouride Way, a complex form of Sufism ably explained in the exhibition's thorough catalog. Some Senegalese Muslims called for holy war against the French occupation, but Bamba was a pacifist whose only jihad was fought against the corruption of his own individual soul. He taught that work is prayer. In the exhibition, a work of art can thus assume a binary dimension -- as a relic of a devotional act, and as its very embodiment.

Among the most compelling objects are poster-like paintings on paper in flat, vivid colors of blue, green, red and gold, which Elimane Fall makes to illustrate inspirational lectures. Nearly 7 feet tall, "Ocean of Generosity" (circa 2000) shows an elegant, stylized rendering of Bamba composed from cascading calligraphy that recites his writings. The saint pours calligraphic water onto humanity from a gourd -- talk about the word made flesh -- erasing distinctions between writing and imagery.

Beneath Bamba's feet -- part pedestal, part foundation -- lies an enormous writing pen. Its presence suggests the Mouride adage, "I am a pen in the hand of God." It resonates against examples of clothing in another gallery -- shirts and shawls decorated with mystical inscriptions, writing that can cloak the bodies of followers.

In this magnificent drawing, as in countless other renderings of Bamba in the show, the artist fills in the enigmatic features of the curious photograph. The ghostly phantom takes on a physical body. The shadowed visage assumes a specific face. The hidden mouth is given voice. It's as if, through his artistic labor, the artist merges with the saintly embodiment of the Mouride Way.

The exhibition is divided into six sections. First is a quick introduction to Islam, which was established in Senegal by the 10th century and is the West African nation's dominant faith. The on-going shift from a rural to an urban population, centered in the Atlantic port city of Dakar, is responsible for such recent developments as an efflorescence of mural painting, as well as burgeoning commercial applications of Mouride Way imagery.

A regional tradition of painting on glass was adapted to Sufism, with biblical, Koranic and other themes. The rendering is crisp yet fragile. A rare early-20th century example from the Fowler's collection, which shows a holy man miraculously floating on water as he prays, is painted in flat shapes and decorative colors thought to derive from mass-produced chromolithographs. Today, new glass paintings are sought-after souvenirs, the way chromolithographs once were.

Next comes an explication of Bamba's life, preceded by the singular photograph, and a devotional room lined with posters, paintings, banners and other artifacts. Although some Muslims consider the depiction of people to be improper, the Koran contains no prohibition against it. Sufists who follow the Mouride Way incorporate figural imagery with calligraphy, numerology and abstract patterning.

Sections on work as prayer and the mystical potency of writing are followed by examples of clothing worn by followers of one of Bamba's chief disciples, Sheikh Ibra Fall. Patched from used fabric remnants in blocks of color, these bold garments embody a sense of joy, humility and spiritual interconnection in both their materials and method of assembly.

The show's sixth and final section is problematic. It gathers art by five contemporary Senegalese artists, who work according to Mouride Way principles. Most are painters, but they're engaged in an academic conversation with antiquated School of Paris Modernism.

The notable exception is Viyé Diba. His paintings of ethereal fields of luminous pigment are brought into equilibrium with strips of torn cloth and rough-hewn blocks of wood, which assert their physical weight and material presence. The work has a phenomenological kick that the other artists can't muster. Diba absorbs Mouride principles of labor into a contemporary idiom, and the result is objects of conviction and power.

-- Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

Urban Dervish: L.A. Bamba
A Senegalese saint at UCLA
FEBRUARY 21 - 27, 2003 - LA Weekly

by Doug Harvey

Los Angeles-IT WAS APPARENT FROM THE FIRST MOMENT that "A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal" was not going to be your typical museum show. When I arrived at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History for a walk-through with the curators, I was told that they were busy briefing the security staff on the distinct possibility that some patrons - especially during the opening - were liable to touch, fondle and even kiss the artworks, and that it was important not to interfere. The patrons in question would be Mourides - members of the Senegalese Islamic sect devoted to Amadou Bamba, the Sufi saint to whom the show's title refers. In spite of preaching nonviolence and an almost Protestant work ethic, Bamba was perceived as a threat to early-20th-century French colonial rulers of this West African nation, and spent much of his life imprisoned, in exile, or under house arrest. In the 75 years since his death, his following has grown to 4 million and spread across the globe, including a large population in New York and a smaller enclave in L.A.

As it turned out, I was meeting with only half the curatorial team - UCLA African-studies professor Al Roberts was stuck at the airport trying to convince the INS that aging glass painter Mor Gueye, who had flown all the way from Senegal for the event, was no threat to national security. Polly Roberts, deputy director and chief curator of the Fowler and Al's co-curator and wife, was more than up to the task. "Saint in the City" touches on the entire history of Islamic art, but the main focus of the show is the incredible proliferation of publicly displayed images of Amadou Bamba, particularly in Senegal's teeming port capital of Dakar. The exhibit is a personal accomplishment for the Robertses, who have been developing the idea for nine years, ever since they saw their first Bamba images while on a trip to Senegal.

"A Saint in the City" opens with a selection of blown-up photographs documenting a quarter-mile-long mural by Papisto Boy, the artist whose Junkyard painting first caught the Robertses' attention. His mural, a 30-years-and-counting work in progress, intersperses images of Bamba with those of civil rights and cultural heroes like Martin Luther King Jr., Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara. Of the four Sufi orders in Senegal, the Mouride Way is the only one with a homegrown figurehead, and Bamba's significance as a political symbol is evident in the prominence of his image during the popular youth uprising of Set/Setal from which Papisto's work emerged - a widespread, late-1980s reclamation of Dakar's public spaces, inspired by a song by Youssou N'Dour and consisting largely of semiguerrilla, public mural painting.

Nine living artists, ranging from Papisto's public-art labors of love to the serene and corporeal abstract painting of Viyé Diba, are featured in the exhibit. Stuffed into every nook and cranny of the exhibit, which is designed to mimic a number of environments including Bamba's shrine at Touba and a Dakar alleyway, are scores of anonymous everyday appearances of Bamba's image - on pamphlets, cassettes, post cards, clocks, shirts, watches, cuttlefish bones, calendars, buses and especially business signage (an optometry stand, a lumberyard, a restaurant, et cetera). Perhaps the most remarkable fact about this superabundance of visual matter is that it all derives from the only known photo of Bamba, taken by French authorities one sun-bleached day in 1913 and reproduced four years later in a book (alongside the only known image of Lamp Fall, Bamba's main disciple and the focus of a subdivision of Mouride as well as a section of the exhibit). From this single low-resolution, high-contrast reproduction sprang the colorful cornucopia of variations that constantly renews itself in Senegal's urban landscape and in the studios of artists and healers.

ONE HIGHLIGHT OF THE EXHIBITION IS THE re-creation of healer Serigne Faye's "imagorium," an immersive environment replete with trompe l'oeil ceiling panels depicting paradise; Assane Dione's photorealist portraits of Bamba's many children and successors; and spinning, multicolored disco lights engraved with the 99 names of God. The section called "Healing Words" includes two of the best artists in the show - Serigne Batch, a healer who inscribes prayer papers with calligraphy and geometric forms before rolling them into belts or dissolving them in water to be consumed by his clients; and Elimane Fall, whose wildly inventive posters - strangely reminiscent of those of Japanese graphic-design genius Tadanori Yokoo - serve as props in his efforts to turn youth away from drugs and prostitution and toward a spiritually nourishing devotion to Bamba.

Then there's the brilliant, animation cel-like glass paintings of Mor Gueye, recognized as the dean of the traditional Senegalese medium and a man willing to tackle any subject matter. While dozens of his works are scattered throughout the show, the main group consists of pictures of Bamba's stations - a series of the saint's archetypal encounters with adversity that are repeated constantly throughout Mouride artworks. Here you'll find Sheikh Amadou Bamba Praying on the Waters, based on the account of how, forbidden to perform his prayers on the ship transporting him into exile, Bamba cast his prayer mat on the surface of the ocean and made his obeisances as pious fish gathered 'round for benediction.

Gueye cleared things up with immigration officials in time for the Fowler opening, and with the help of two translators (from English to French to Wolof) I asked him a question that kept coming to me as I walked through the show. Although the Mouride artists had obviously cooperated fully with their presentation as a secular academic/aesthetic curiosity, their reasons for making fine art must be radically different than the prevailing Western model: Why make art?

"What I want to do in life is to show people who Amadou Bamba is," said Gueye. "That's what my purpose is. I want to make portraits of the saint because I want to show people who the saint was, and have the opportunity to teach about the saint. But also when I make portraits of the saint, it gives me a blessing and a protection, for myself and my family. So I want to do this for the rest of my life, because this is my deep purpose. The love of my life is to show people who the saint was, and wherever the saint's image is, that's where I want to be."

What then, I wondered, is the reason for painting secular images of, say, the Lakers?

"If it were up to me, I would only paint images of the saint," said Gueye, "but because I have the ability to paint and people want to have other subjects, I paint them also, to make a living. But if I had the opportunity, I would only paint images of the saint."

"A Saint in the City" challenges a number of popular Western misconceptions concerning Islam. Clearly the prohibition of representational art is nowhere near as absolute as many believe, and Amadou Bamba's example of pacifist resolution (he once said that the only jihad he would lead was against the venality of his own soul) is in keeping with Islam's underreported history of religious and political tolerance. But perhaps the show's greatest challenge is to contemporary Western ways of thinking about art making. To hear a professional visual artist convey such assurance and calm joy about his practice, and to witness its utter saturation with meaning through its conception, execution and public reception, is certainly heartening to anyone concerned with art's potential to do good in the world. But compared to the Mouride artists, most of the timid, constrained posers working The Art World seem like small fish in a small pond, unaware of the element in which they swim but desperately needing benediction. They should stick their heads out and look around.

ART REVIEW | 'SUFI ARTS OF URBAN SENEGAL'
New York Times / February 16, 2005
Caught Up in the Aura of a Senegalese Saint

By HOLLAND COTTER

GAINESVILLE, Fla., Feb. 11 - Listen, if you haven't yet, to the great pop stars of Senegal: Youssou N'Dour, Cheikh Lo, Baaba Maal. You'll adore what you hear and discover what they have in common, like the hustle and ping of their sound, etched with koras and horns. The other is what they sing about: transfixing passion, not for earthly lovers but for the holy men, marabouts, the Sufi saints of Islam. Theirs is a Higher Love, so high it's out of sight.

Among the saints' names, one recurs, over and over: Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the African Sufi movement known as the Mouride Way. And far from being out of sight, his white-robed, dark-skinned figure is visible everywhere in the modern city of Dakar: inside homes, shops, in public murals, in paintings and prints sold in markets, in amulets worn around the neck.

He's also omnipresent now at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art here, in the traveling show "A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal." Like Bamba himself, it's out of the ordinary, an event. Its heady mix of materials - high and low, sacred and profane - is a joy to the eye. But more important, it introduces us to an art we don't know, an Africa and an Islam we don't know.

When I say "African art," what do you think? Villages, carved masks, "primitive"? But Mouride art is cosmopolitan and modern, portrait painting and history painting, calligraphy and photography. How about "Islam"? Fundamentalist? Anti-Western? Dangerous? Well, there are many Islams, and Sufism, mystical and pacific, is one. The plan for living Bamba prescribed is based on tolerance, generosity and hard work, values most Americans treasure.

Bamba was born in Senegal in 1853 and became a spiritual leader and, by default, a potent political figure at the height of French colonialism. The French tried hard to make him disappear; they kept him under house arrest until his death in 1927. But their efforts only intensified his charisma, which continues today, through a proliferation of images, almost all variations on the only known photograph of him, taken in 1913. In it, he stands outdoors against the wooden walls of a mosque, squinting at the camera. He's dressed in white, and his head is covered by a turbanlike shawl, one end obscuring the lower half of his face. So strong is the midday glare that his hands and right foot are lost in shadow. To the average Western viewer, their absence is an accident of photography. To the Mouride believer, it is proof of Bamba's superhuman status: what need does a transcendent being have of hands and feet?

It is this attitude, the attitude of the believer - not of the art historian or the anthropologist or the sociologist - that prevails in the show, which has been organized by Allen F. Roberts, director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at the University of California, at Los Angeles, and Mary Nooter Roberts, deputy director of the U.C.L.A. Fowler Museum of Cultural History, where it originally appeared in a larger form.

Belief is in the air from the minute you enter the galleries and catch Mr. N'Dour's sweet, high, ardent voice. "Do you hear me, Father Bamba?" he sings. And it takes visual form in panoramic photographs of a 600-foot-long mural painted by a Mouride street artist known as Papisto Boy.

Bamba is depicted many times, punctuating a pantheon of global personalities ranging from Che Guevara and Bob Marley to a demonic Osama bin Laden and a dapper President George W. Bush flanked by Senegalese soldiers who fought with American troops in the gulf war.

Ideologically eclectic, not to say confounding, the painting has much to say about the balance of resistance and pragmatic accommodation that defined Mouride politics even in Bamba's day.

In other photographs, the show tracks the saint's presence throughout the city, where he is seen staring from doorways and flashing by on the sides of buses, sometimes accompanied by his first and closest disciple, Sheikh Ibra Fall (1858-1930), affectionately called "the Lamp."

There are stories of Bamba's life, told in vividly colored paintings on glass by the contemporary artist Mor Gueye. Some show the saint with his mother, a kind of Virgin Mary figure and the focus of a section of the show devoted to the place of women in Mouride culture.

Other pictures illustrate his abuse by the French and still others his miracles: Bamba taming a lion, praying on the surface of the sea, sitting unfazed in a raging fire.

Particularly intriguing are portraits of him worked out entirely in calligraphy, using his poems, which he is said to have produced literally by the ton. Fine writing is the most revered of Islamic art forms. But the calligraphic paintings of the Mouride artist Elimane Fall go way, way beyond fine, into an aesthetic of extravagance that, at its best, mesmerizes like music and advertises spiritual truths with Pop Art's graphic punch.

I couldn't take my eyes off Mr. Fall's huge, ultra-ornamental "Ocean of Generosity," with its characters pouring down in waterfalls. Young painters in New York, so infatuated with linear complexity, would absolutely flip over it. A Mouride visitor to the museum, however, would gravitate to very different examples of writing, worth more than everything in the show put together: three small sheets of paper with script in Bamba's hand.

The spiritual electricity - baraka - generated by such relics doesn't really translate into Western art terms. It's piercing and oceanic; it enters your being, floods it, and alters its structure as if it were benign radiation. To some degree, every image of Bamba, original or reproduced, is believed to project such an aura. It can be collective in nature, so that a whole city throbs with free-flowing grace. Or it can be concentrated, as it is in a shrine room installed at the center of the show.

The walls are tightly hung with oil portraits of Bamba's family. Tapes of his chanted poems play. A faceted disco light illuminates the space. Each colored facet carries, microscopically inscribed, the 99 names of God. With each flash, blessings shoot out, and the conceptual distance between the museum as secular environment and holy ground narrows.

The divide between sacred and profane also narrows in the show's final section, which consists of art conceived in an internationalist context. From a standard Western point of view, the semi-abstract "modernist" paintings of artists like Moussa Tine and Viye Diba present a problem: they aren't "African" or "Islamic" enough; they're too "Western," meaning derivative.

Many of the forms regarded as cutting edge to the West in the past 40 years - installation art, conceptual art, text-based art, performance art, body art, sound art - have been integral to African and Islamic cultures for centuries. Yet Picasso's adaptation of African forms is viewed as evidence of his receptive vision, while an African artist riffing on Picasso's riffs on Africa is a copycat.

Interestingly, the international-style art in the show raises the question of authenticity in another way. How spiritually efficacious is an image-based religious art once its image is rendered abstract? Does such art actively, if surreptitiously, carry the Mouride spirit into the Euro-American market? Or, by tailoring itself to that market, does it leave the spirit out? It is to the curators' credit that they not only raise these questions - they would have had a tidier, safer show without them - but also give the artists a chance to express their views in the exhibition catalog.

The book, by the way, is wonderful, intellectually wide-ranging and deeply humane, as well as visually vibrant, more so than the exhibition itself, which feels less atmospheric and dense here than it did in Los Angeles. This is a space issue: the Harn has less of it and what there is is somewhat choppily arranged. That said, the museum is impressive. There is an expansion in progress, it has a strong non-Western collection on permanent view, and it is part of an institution, the University of Florida, blessed with a young, very on-the-ball Center for African Studies.

The center's director, Leonardo A. Villalón, organized a symposium to accompany the show. Titled "Islam in Africa: Sufism and Modernity in a Globalized World," it approached Mouride art through the lenses of history, politics, religion, sociology, linguistics, and, finally, music. Indeed, after many hours' worth of ideas, questions, arguments and emotions, the long day ended where the exhibition itself began, with Mr. N'Dour's voice and words: "My strong faith in you makes me survive in this crazy world. Now I can go anywhere, because I know you'll be there. We know your pain will always make us stronger, Father Bamba."