Skunder Boghossian

• Name — Skunder Boghossian • Native Name — እስክንድር ቦጎሲያን Սկունդեր Բողոսյան • Birth Name — Alexander Boghossian • Born — 22 July 1937 • Birthplace — Addis Ababa, Italian East Africa (now Ethiopia) • Died — 4 May 2003 • Place of death — Howard University Hospital, Washington, D.C., US • Occupation — * Painter • professor • Education — Saint Martin's School of Art Central School of Art and Design Slade School of Fine Art Académie de la Grande Chaumière Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts • Children — 2

Alexander Boghossian was born on July 22, 1937 in Addis Ababa, Italian East Africa a year and a half after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Boghossian's mother, Tsedale-Wolde Tekle, was Ethiopian and his father, Kosrof Gorgorios Boghossian, was an Armenian colonel in the Kebur Zabagna and a member of the Ethiopian resistance. Boghossian had a sister and a half brother. In 1938, Boghossian's father was imprisoned for seven years by the Italian authorities. His mother had set up a new life apart her children and although both he and his sister visited their mother frequently, they were raised in the home of their uncle Kathig Boghassian. Kathig, who was serving as the Assistant Minister of Agriculture, together with other uncles and aunts brought them up during their father's imprisonment. He attended a traditional kindergarten where he was taught the Ge'ez script. In primary and secondary school, he was taught by both Ethiopian and foreign tutors and became fluent in Amharic, Armenian, English, and French. He studied art informally at the Teferi Mekonnen School. He also studied under Stanislaw Chojnacki, a historian of Ethiopian art and watercolor painter. French Canadian philosopher and painter, Jacques Goudbet, also influenced Boghossian, allowing him to create paintings without them feeling forced. As a teenager, an African American neighbor and family friend, Larry Erskine not only gave him his first feedback on his drawings, but introduced him to jazz through Voice of America, and throughout his life jazz was often playing in the background as he worked on paintings. He claimed jazz to be "a very heavy movement of the twentieth century. It is not one person; it is not one thought, it is a combination of geniuses... the constant modulation of concepts... it is the one thing we have, black folks, as artists...". In 1954, Boghossian won second prize at the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Haile Selassie I. The following year Boghossian settled in London and studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, Central School of Art and Design, and Slade School of Fine Art under an Imperial scholarship. In 1957, Boghossian relocated to Paris and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. According to Solomon Deressa, Boghossian never finished his formal education.

After meeting artists and likeminded individuals like Leopold Sedar Sendhor and Madelaine Rousseux, Boghossian gained enough clout to be invited to participate in the Second Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Rome. This along with his acclaim gained from his 1964 exhibition at the Galerie Lambert earned him an invitation to become a member of the avant-garde movement, Phase, which he left shortly to work with André Breton. In 1966 he returned home, teaching at Addis Ababa's School of Fine Arts until 1969. In 1970 he emigrated to the United States, first to Atlanta, where he became acquainted with the Black Arts Movement and taught at Atlanta's Center for Black Art, then he moved to Washington, D.C., where he taught at Howard University from 1972 until 2001. Boghossian was the first contemporary African artist to have his work purchased by the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1963. In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his painting Juju's Wedding (1964). In 1977, he became the first African to design a First Day Cover for a United Nations stamp. He was commissioned by the World Federation of United Nations Associations. His pen and ink drawing on the theme of "Combat Racism" for the cover and the accompanying stamp were issued on September 19, 1977. In 2001, Boghossian worked with Kebedech Tekleab on a commission called Nexus for the Wall of Representation at the Embassy of Ethiopia in Washington, D.C. The work is an aluminum relief sculpture (365 x 1585 cm) mounted on the granite wall of the embassy. Nexus includes decorative motifs, patterns and symbols from Ethiopian religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other indigenous spiritual practices incorporating symbolic scrolls and forms representing musical instruments, utilitarian tools, and regional flora and fauna. Most recently, Boghossian is represented in New York by the Contemporary African Art Gallery. The umbrella organization for Ethiopia's oldest secular schools is named after him, the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts.

While he spent some time in Paris, Boghossian talked often about political and cultural influences, citing Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop as well as creative forces in modern art like Paul Klee. Less well-known painters like Gerard Sekoto introduced him to the great Cuban surrealist painter, Wifredo Lam. He also worked closely with a group of West African artists. The radical politics of Black Power and the Black Arts Movement in the United States can be seen and they seem to have inspired his paintings with coded and overt political themes, such as Black Emblem (1969), The End of the Beginning (1972), and DMZ (1975). His involvement with the Black Arts Movement impacted his work in more ways than just one. His earlier paintings depended on the combination of biomorphic forms and minutely detailed abstract notations, he populated the spaces of his new work with bold, polychomatic, geometric, and "African" motifs.

Boghossian met Marilyn Pryce in Paris, 1964, while she was studying cinematography. They were married in Tuskegee, Alabama, Pryce's hometown, but the marriage later ended in divorce. He had two children, Aida Mariam and Edward Addisu, a sister, and four grandchildren. On May 4, 2003 Boghossian died at Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC., aged 65.

• Night Flight of Dread and Delight 1964 • Axum 1967 • The End of the Beginning 1973 • African Images 1980 • Time Cycle III 1981 • The Metamorphoses 1982 • Jacob’s Ladder 1984 • Nexus 2001

• Contemporary Ethiopian art at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. • Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. • National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. • The Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building in Addis Ababa. • 1965: Fourth Biennale in Paris. • 1966: Salon de Comparison. • 1972: The Studio Museum in Harlem. • 2002: The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994