The ending of the conflict between the two neighboring countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time, with the new year Sept. 9, and the opening of a new exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora that celebrates the life and work of Ficre Ghebreyesus (1962–2012): A City with a River Running Through (Sept. 18- Dec. 16) which is a small selection of a body of work 900 paintings, that spans ten years.  Unsigned and undated, the work here is a glimpse into a conceptual world where form, shape, color, design tell the story of a contemporary migration, forced by warfare. It is the story of displacement, the work witness to Ghebreyesus’s changing internal landscape as Diaspora became his pillow, home a dream on canvas. This is how the artist spoke best though fluent in other vocabulary—printmaking, culinary arts, writing, photography, film. The exhibit is a delicious journey where our eyes carry us from the opening canvas into the masterful title track or visual journey.

Ghebreyesus’s life is epic and so is his work—he leaves Asmara and travels through many countries Sudan, Italy, Germany and then settles in the New York where he and his brothers open Caffé  Adulis, a restaurant that  brought creative Eritrean cuisine to the US. He begins to paint later once he is married and a father now living in New Haven.  At 40 he goes to art school. Elizabeth Alexander says, at a recent panel discussion with Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, moderated by Dr. Harry Elam, during the exhibit’s opening week, that a teacher at Yale asked Ghebreyesus where was the “African color?” he replied, “Do you mean Red, Black and Green?”

Alexander showed a painting of the couple’s first date, their future children angels—both she and Ghebreyesus have something in their hands. She said he asked about her family, because he couldn’t do crazy. His tribe is big and she spoke of what that adjustment meant to her smaller nuclear family. The largess was a philosophical expansion too that she embraced.

Themes traverse the visual journey, its hardship, its beauty. At times the artist invents a language—when words cannot convey adequately his meaning. One’s eyes follow the cartography, etchings and other print designs. This work is in conversation with Second Look, Twice: Selections  from  the  Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation which features print work from 15 artists including Robert Blackburn (1920- 2003), an icon, whose famous print studio in New York welcomed generations of artists like     Ficre Ghebreyesus.

The work in this first major exhibition, curated  by  Lowery  Stokes  Sims,  Independent  Curator,  and  Emily  Kuhlmann,  Director  of  Exhibitions  and  Curatorial  Affairs at MoAD, invite investigation and the bench in the larger gallery tells patrons to sit, relax, don’t rush.  This is just part 1.
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Once seated, patrons sees bottle trees, boats, and lots of fishes—spill leap roll off canvases and wiggle across the floor. Abstract and figurative objects people the terrain as the titles of some of the work linger, like the self-portrait called “the boy who consumes books.”  Ms. Alexander said she and her husband loved books—she had the US covered and he the rest of the world. The camaraderie between the two artists born the same year, is just one of many highlights of their lives.

Fascinated with West African spirituality, one sees both traditions, East and West Africa meeting in America on canvas—New York and then New Haven, via the music, dance, funeral rights, magic or spirituality and visual art. In a slide show, Ms. Alexander showed a work that references Akan caskets which take the form of the person’s profession or something they loved like an automobile.

Ghebreyesus never forgot his politics or the circumstances that led to his loss. Granted, the wise immigrant does not forget his homeland even if he cannot return, but Ghebreyesus does return during the long undocumented war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. He films interviews with teachers and children at the Revolution School – a place where orphaned children are nurtured by adults.  As patrons watch the raw footage in the MoAD screening room, we hear bombs in the distance and see injured adults and children. Yet, despite the danger, the revolutionaries sing, dance and laugh with the children and each other.

Alexander says Ghebreyesus’s body of work is undated, unsigned and not necessarily historical—“they are spirit works about elsewhere.”  He found teachers everywhere . . .  printmaking at Bob Blackburn’s workshop—however, Alexander says, “paint was where her husband liked to worry and create.  He was a committed activist and community builder and this came through his work, [a work that allowed the artist to illustrate for others the trauma of separation, the isolation of Diaspora and the joy of love.

That he was able to tell this visual story only after he and his wife met, were married and started a family says something about the sanctuary – place, love and hope which allowed Ghebreyesus space to tell this important story, a Diaspora story those of us away from a tangible and philosophical homeland relate to on so many levels evident in the layered surfaces peopled by imagined language, symbols both figurative and abstract within a fluidity of water like the cloth his mother spun with colors she created. The Museum of the African Diaspora is located at 685 Mission Street in San Francisco and (415) 358-7200.

Ficre says in his artist statement excerpted here surrounded by self-portraits on the website page:  “I started painting ten years ago, but I suspect I have been metaphorically doing so all my life.  When I started painting, I just did it.  I had never felt a stronger urge.  The pieces that flowed out of me were very painful and direct.  They had to do with the suffering, persecution, and subsequent psychological dilemmas I endured before and after becoming a young refugee from the Independence War (1961-1991) in my natal home of Eritrea, East Africa. Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life”.