Pictures are a form of knowledge, and knowledge, they say, is power. We are used to the idea that European masterpieces hanging in the Louvre or giant abstract paintings displayed in corporate lobbies radiate cultural authority. But what if the pictures in question are simple maps, diagrams or \u2014 as in the remarkable oeuvre of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bruly Bouabr\u00e9 \u2014 rudimentary approximations of things seen and known, drawn in ballpoint pen and colored pencil on index cards or cheap cardboard?<\/p>\n
\u201cFr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bruly Bouabr\u00e9: World Unbound,\u201d at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, sets more than a thousand of these small, colorful drawings, all in white frames, across a run of large galleries in a display unlike any I have seen. Organized by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, the show is at once overwhelming and refreshing \u2014 a spur to laughter, fascination and philosophical reflection. And it\u2019s only the second show at MoMA of a Black artist from Africa.<\/p>\n
Bouabr\u00e9 (1923-2014) was born in a B\u00e9t\u00e9 village near Daloa, the major city in west-central C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire. He was one of the first Ivoirians to be educated by the French colonial government, and he turned to art after experiencing a vision in 1948. Forty years later, he offered a definition of art that rinses the mind like cool, silken water drenching a heat-flushed face. \u201cArt is know-how,\u201d he said. \u201cArt is searching, re-researching, and discovering sublime innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bouabr\u00e9\u2019s drawings include handwritten descriptions (in French) that meander around the rectilinear borders of each image. He uses them, as he said, \u201cto explain what I\u2019ve drawn,\u201d in the belief that \u201cwriting is what immortalizes. Writing fights against forgetting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A survey of the career of the Ivory Coast\u2019s Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bruly Bouabr\u00e9, one of the continent\u2019s most celebrated artists, comes to New York<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":5112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,16],"tags":[7,30,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-5115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-news","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-news"},"yoast_head":"\n