International Artist Wosene Worke Kosrof Participates in Art Gallery Open Dialogue March 20
An exhibition of works by renowned international artist Wosene Worke Kosrof is on display in the Guilford College Art Gallery in Hege Library March 12-May 4.
On Tuesday, March 20, Wosene will join Professor of Art Roy Nydorf and poet Douglas Smith at 7:30 p.m. in the Art Gallery, for an open dialogue. This event is free and open to the public.
In The New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote "Is Wosene an African artist? An American artist? Modern? Postmodern? He is all of these." Wosene Worke Kosrof (or simply Wosene, as he is known professionally) was born in Ethiopia in 1950, came to the United States in 1978, and now resides in California. Academically trained as an artist both in his native Ethiopia as well as in the U.S. (receiving a master's in fine art degree from Howard University), Wosene was one of the first contemporary African artists to gain international critical acclaim.
More than just an African or American artist, however, Wosene combines multiple cultures in his distinctive works. His works, according to Cotter, "[blend] written letters of Ethiopia with Western-style gestural painting. The results are abstract, but richly coded, with fractured texts, personal symbols &, and a palette of jewel-like colors -- reds, yellows and greens -- associated with Ethiopian iconic painting."
Wosene's art has been shown in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the United Nations, the Hoshigaoka Gallery in Japan, and the National Exhibition Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, among many others in a career that has spanned close to four decades. He has been an artist in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, as well as at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. According to Allyson Purpura, Consulting Curator of The University of Michigan Museum of Art, "Wosene is a master translator of human experience."
For more information about the artist, exhibit, or dialogue on March 20, contact Terry Hammond at 316-2438 or thammond@guilford.edu.
March 20, 2007