Wosene Worke Kosrof

Biography

In 1973, a year after finishing at the School of Fine Arts, Wosene had his first solo exhibition in Addis Ababa, at the Belvedere Gallery. There he met Duke Ellington. Jazz has stayed in his painting ever since: the artist says that improvisation underlies his compositions.

He was born in 1950 in Addis Ababa, in the Arat Kilo district (the year of birth is also given differently, but 1950 is the most common). Wosene (the name he uses professionally) entered the School of Fine Arts at sixteen on his brother’s advice. There he studied lettering and calligraphy with local artists and became fascinated by the aesthetics of writing and of traditional Ethiopian icons. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1972, according to some accounts with honours and with an award from Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1974 the National Museum of Ethiopia bought his paintings, and several solo exhibitions followed in Addis Ababa. In 1977 he left the country, spent time in Kenya and ended up in the United States, where he did graduate work at Howard University in Washington and received his M.F.A. in 1980. His mentor and adviser there was Jeff Donaldson. From 1984 Wosene taught, among other places at Goddard College in Vermont, and from 1990 to 2000 he led a summer course in acrylic painting for high-school students at the Governor’s Institute on the Arts in Vermont.

For the United Nations he designed a stamp for the “Africa in Crisis” campaign (1986), and in 1988 he painted two pictures for the organisation’s collection.

In 1991 Wosene moved to California, first to Mendocino and then to Sacramento, where he taught at the Union Institute. In 1995 he settled in the Oakland and Berkeley area and returned to Ethiopia for a short stay for the first time in eighteen years. That same year his work was shown in the exhibition “Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and his first exhibition in Japan took place at the Hoshigaoka Gallery. In 1996 he became the first contemporary artist of African origin invited to a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s centre in Bellagio; there he saw Michelangelo’s “Prisoners” and, in his own words, felt their influence. In 2003 the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art acquired his work. In those same years solo exhibitions were held at the Newark Museum and at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Wosene’s main subject is the Amharic script, which descends from Ge’ez and is one of the few writing systems that arose in Africa. He distorts, elongates, dissects and reassembles the characters, treating them as visual symbols detached from literal meaning. He makes no preliminary sketches. He describes his own method as exploratory, a meeting of accident and intention; quick-drying acrylic lets him build and destroy colours and figures on the canvas with ease. Sometimes he works in mixed media: goat skin, parchment, wood, sheet metal, nails, tin cans. Music, above all the jazz of Coltrane, Parker, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, can be heard, I think, in the rhythm of the brushstroke itself.

His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Newark Museum, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the National Museum and the City of Addis Ababa Museum, the United Nations, the World Bank and the Library of Congress. Wosene lives and works in Oakland, California.