Ale Felege Selam

Biography

The school in Addis Ababa began as private lessons in an ordinary house. Ale Felege Selam, back from the United States, held a post at the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts and in his spare time taught drawing to secondary-school pupils. He sold their work at exhibitions attended by diplomats and members of the imperial family, and handed the proceeds, 75,000 Ethiopian dollars, to Emperor Haile Selassie to found a school.

The emperor agreed.

His year of birth is given variously as 1923, 1924 or 1925; a date of 31 July 1923 also appears, and sometimes even 1929 is given. Only the year of his death is firmly established. He came from Fiche, in the Selale region. His family had painted for churches over several generations: his father, Felege Selam, and an uncle were also painters, and his grandfather, according to the journalist Tesfalidet Bizuworq, Hiruy Woldegiorgis, enjoyed the favour of Emperor Menelik II and painted churches on Mount Entoto. The boy taught himself to draw and paint. In an interview with the magazine Demakochu (2008) he said that as a child the Italian occupation authorities had condemned him to death after a brawl in which an Italian servant was killed, and that he got away in time. I have not been able to check this account against any documents.

Later he settled in Addis Ababa, finished the Addis Ababa Technical School with distinction and worked at a garage. Haile Selassie awarded him a scholarship to study engineering in America, but he enrolled instead at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1954 received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He stayed in the United States for another year, earning money, then spent three months touring museums in Europe, chiefly in France and Italy, before going home.

The school began operating in 1957–1958; by one account its formal opening took place on 23 July 1958, the emperor's 66th birthday. There were no Ethiopian teachers trained for such a post, so Ale turned to foreign embassies. The first instructors were the Austrian sculptor Herbert Seiler, the German printmaker Hansen Bahia and the Italian painter Vincenzo Fumo; later the Ethiopian painter and calligrapher Yigazu Bisrat joined them. He taught drawing and painting as he himself had been taught in Chicago. As Ethiopians who had studied abroad returned home, he added them to the faculty: Gebre Kristos Desta arrived in 1962, Skunder Boghossian in 1966.

In 1961 Ale took part in the exhibition “Contemporary Art of Ethiopia” in Moscow. He painted portraits of statesmen and ordinary people (among them “Portrait of a Man in White”, 1952, and “Portrait of a Woman”, 1961), landscapes and genre scenes, and made book illustrations, posters and designs for postage stamps. His manner is realistic, joining ancient Ethiopian religious imagery to modern methods. His paintings were exhibited in Germany, Greece, India, the Soviet Union and the United States.

After the Derg, the military council that took power in 1974, he was forced out of the directorship; in 1975 the teaching staff chose Abdurahman Sherif to replace him. For five years Ale worked with the heritage maintenance unit of the Ministry of Culture, repairing church and monastery archives in remote areas, and left it after disagreements with the authorities.

In the early 1990s he moved to Adama (Nazareth). For about eight years he painted the walls and dome of St. Mary's Church there, and he resumed teaching at the school. He also painted murals in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa and in Kulubi Gabriel church near Harar. In 2006 he went to the United States to paint Medhane Alem, an Ethiopian Orthodox church near Washington, D.C.

The school became part of Addis Ababa University in 2000, and since 2010 it has been called the Ale School of Fine Arts and Design. According to Bizuworq, he wanted his complete name used. The school's collection includes a 1999 portrait of him by a former pupil, Tadesse Mesfin, painted from a photograph taken while Ale was director.

Ale Felege Selam died on 11 July 2016 in Addis Ababa. After a funeral service at Holy Trinity Cathedral he was buried at Debre Libanos monastery.