Kebedech Tekleab

Biography

In 2001 Kebedech Tekleab and Alexander Boghossian made the relief “Nexus” for the Ethiopian embassy in Washington: aluminium panels measuring 365 by 1,585 centimetres, mounted on a granite wall.

The relief combines ornaments and symbols from Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions, as well as indigenous beliefs. Among its motifs are scrolls and the outlines of musical instruments, tools, and local plants and animals. It is the best known of her public works.

She was born in 1958 in Ethiopia. She studied at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa and, while still a student, took part in the student resistance movement during the revolution of the late 1970s, which was directed against the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. When she tried to leave the country, she found herself in the war zone of the war between Ethiopia and Somalia. She was detained and sent to a labour camp, where she spent almost ten years. The exact circumstances of her detention and the name of the camp are unknown, and I was not able to check them. In 1989 she was released and moved to join her family in the United States. At Howard University she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1995. There she studied, among others, with Skunder Boghossian, one of the pioneers of the Ethiopian avant-garde. Her thesis project was the Punishment Series, which grew out of the thesis topic “Humanity In Descent: Visual Images Of Human Suffering”. She has taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and at Howard University in Washington, and now teaches at the City University of New York.

The themes of her painting are war, armed conflict and social injustice. The painting “The River in Rwanda” is dedicated to the genocide of the Tutsi; it was later bought by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. In “Shackled” a golden structure made of body parts alludes to the ten years in the camp, while in “Insulated” a row of striped circles stands for the circle of friends who helped her endure imprisonment. She names both her own biography and her mother, with her generosity, as inspiration.

Tekleab writes poems in Amharic and in English. They appear in “Songs We Learn From the Trees”, the first anthology of Amharic poetry in English translation, alongside poems by Kebede Michael and Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin.

In 2003 her work was shown in the exhibition “Ethiopian Passages” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, among other Ethiopian artists, including Aida Muluneh and Elizabeth Atnafu. Her paintings are in the permanent displays of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, the Navy Memorial Archives in Washington, the US embassy in Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian embassy in Washington.