MOR FAYE (1947-1984)

Mor Faye the African Sphinx, the Eternal Artist Painter By Pr Samba Diop Mor Faye, a late Senegalese artist, and painter who died in Dakar in 1984 is being remembered and celebrated thanks to the current exhibition at the SKOTO Gallery in New York City (January 2017) organized by the well-known Art collector Me Bara Diokhane.  Even though a very talented artist, Faye was—and still is—not well known in his own country of Senegal. To summarize his biography, Faye was born in Dakar in 1947 and died at an early age in the same city in 1984. He attended the famous National School of Arts of Dakar founded by President Leopold Senghor and under the direction of another equally well-known Senegalese artist, namely Iba Ndiaye. Mor Faye also taught painting in high schools. Thus, Faye was at once a painter and an educator. Thus, it is fair to say that Faye is among the first cohort of Senegalese painters and sculptors attending some sort of formal institution in order t...

Mor Faye's Journey to the End of Negritude For many, the name of “Mor Faye” evokes immediately the figure of the artiste maudit (the cursed artist). Sure, when he died from cerebral malaria in 1984, he was only 37, the age when many martyrs, saints, revolutionaries are enshrined in eternal youth. Sure, he had spent most of the last five years of his life after 1979 in psychiatric hospitals, badly in need of care for mental illness. And sure, after the highly praised role his work has played in the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts and after his solo show at the Galerie 39 in Dakar in 1976, he had stopped participating in exhibitions and had withdrawn from the art world in Dakar under the patronage of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet-President of Senegal: when he was not incapacitated by psychiatric crises, Mor Faye devoted his daytime to teaching art in a high school in Dakar and reserved his nights to his own artistic creation. All that being said, to consider...

MOR FAYE (1947-1984) It’s history in the making! No art gallery in the US United States has ever hosted a posthumous solo exhibit of a Senegalese painter. Mor Faye will change that, It is true that Mor Faye’s work had been spotted once in New York City,  in the last century, when the Museum For African art exhibited the five West African artists whose works had been just shown at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. Ten of Mor Faye’s works on paper were part of that collective exhibit ‘Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale”. In her introduction to the catalog that accompanied the Fusion exhibit, Susan Vogel referred to Mor Faye as "arguably one of Africa's finest artists working in an international contemporary style”…"A superb colorist who relished the sensuous fluidity of paint, Mor Faye absorbed the vocabulary of a dozen modern European masters, and created work alternately idyllic, nightmarish, and whimsical, but always his own.” That New Y...