Cultural exchange

Several weeks ago, Ethiopian painter Qes Adamu Tesfaw flew on an
airplane for the very first time in his life at the age of 75. It
would have been great, except that the flight from Ethiopia to
Germany and then on to LAX was 27 hours long, and Tesfaw had a fear
of flying.

His trip to the United Sates, however, was a dream-like
opportunity that he couldn’t pass up.

“He was very excited about it,” said Ray Silverman,
who has worked with Tesfaw over the last 12 years.
“It’s something that he could have only dreamed about
because most Ethiopians don’t have an opportunity like
that.”

It was his first time traveling to another country, but it was
what he was traveling for that was probably the bigger dream than
traveling itself. He was attending the opening-week festivities of
the very first exhibit dedicated solely to his artwork,
“Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu
Tesfaw,” which will run at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural
History until Sept. 18, and which Silverman curated.

Once he landed, Tesfaw experienced an unusual amount of
celebrity attention, which research assistant Leah Niederstadt said
was strange for him because he’s used to keeping to himself.
At the car rental service after landing at LAX, Tesfaw was greeted
enthusiastically by a group of Ethiopians who worked there and had
heard he was coming. And at the exhibit’s opening week
events, like the family mural-making workshop the Fowler hosted on
March 12, guests asked Tesfaw to sign autographs and to pose for
photos.

The mural-making workshop, which the Fowler Museum held in its
second-floor studio, was itself a first-time experience for Tesfaw.
He spent the majority of the three-hour session observing 21
complete strangers paint in one of his charcoal-outlined
drawings.

For the first couple of hours, he stood, at a comfortable
distance, silently observing the guests paint while scratching his
white, closely cropped beard. He watched so closely that it almost
seemed like he was one of the museum visitors viewing one of his
paintings in the gallery downstairs.

Later, he rested his feet by sitting at the back of the
classroom-sized studio, and chatted in Amharic with the other
Ethiopian adults while continuing to watch the young paint.

Tesfaw himself began painting as a young boy in rural Ethiopia.
The son of a priest, he was fascinated by the paintings he saw in
church in his hometown of Bichena. He would create art on virtually
any available material, including fragments of ceramics and broken
bones softened with an axe and eventually learned how to paint
while studying for the priesthood.

It was with his ordination that Tesfaw received the honorific
title “Qes.” However, he later left the priesthood in
order to pursue painting full-time. Although he no longer lives the
life of a priest, much of Tesfaw’s paintings still depict
various religious themes and tell the stories of various
saints.

The tradition of painting in the Eastern Orthodox church goes
back 1500 years and is a tradition that is evident in
Tesfaw’s paintings through the depiction of religious subject
matter, but also through the heavy use of patterns, the emphasis
placed on eyes and, most importantly, tiny inscriptions in the
ancient ecclesiastical language of Ge’ez that serve as
narrative notes and identify the major figures in the mural
paintings.

Throughout the history of the church, Silverman said these
inscriptions have been used by priests as references in their
teachings. Even today in rural areas of Ethiopia where churchgoers
are often illiterate, priests and deacons will stand in front of a
painting and teach the churchgoers the history of their faith
through the narrative paintings.

With his own works, Tesfaw continues this tradition of art as a
teaching aid, although they are meant more to teach Ethiopian
history and culture rather than religion. At the mural-making
workshop, Tesfaw said through a translator that his ultimate hope
for his paintings is that they educate people about the different
faces of Ethiopia, mostly its history and culture.

It seems that with every chance he gets, Tesfaw pursues this
goal. During the hour prior to the mural-making workshop, Tesfaw
sat alone in the studio with his translator, UCLA political science
graduate student Shimelis Bonsa, working on another painting. With
a bottle of black paint in his left hand, and a brush in his right,
he spoke quietly to Shimelis about what he was painting.

The mural he was working on is one of his fused image paintings,
with three separate events occurring in the same mural. On the
left, Jesus is depicted curing the sick and blind, at the middle
are clergy members conducting holy communion, and on the right is
Jesus washing the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper.

“What I found most interesting about him is how invested
he is in the stories he paints, and that when you ask him to talk
about the quality of his painting, he doesn’t talk about the
formal qualities of the painting, he doesn’t talk about the
aesthetic issues, he talks about the content,” Silverman
said. “That’s the whole reason why they’re being
produced.”

Tesfaw had also spent part of the prior week talking through a
translator with hundreds of school children about Ethiopia’s
history and culture. Religion is just one of three thematic
categories Tesfaw’s paintings encompass. He also paints
scenes of Ethiopian history and Ethiopian culture. In fact, the
Fowler exhibit is organized so that each of the three rooms of the
exhibit focuses on one thematic category. The first room features
Tesfaw’s religious-themed paintings, the second features
those paintings depicting Ethiopian history and the third is
comprised of those depicting everyday Ethiopian life.

Some historical events depicted in the paintings of the second
room include King Solomon seducing the Queen of Sheba, the Battle
of Adwa and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie receiving Queen
Elizabeth as a guest.

The third room contains paintings depicting Ethiopian
ceremonies, games, the buying and selling of sheep in a marketplace
and the AIDS epidemic in “We Must Unite In Prayer to Fight
HIV/AIDS,” in which AIDS is shown as Satan, skinny and red
with a skin disease.

A plaque next to the painting quotes Tesfaw: “The painting
is my gift to help teach. I am a painter so I teach through my
paintings.”

It is for his efforts to relay Ethiopian culture and history
through his paintings that Tesfaw was greeted with so much
reverence by his fellow countrymen at the workshop. There was the
utmost respect between the artist and his admirers, but perhaps
even more so from one Ethiopian to another. When they shook hands,
they also made the effort to bow and support the shaking hand with
the free hand.

“We’re impressed with his work and he’s
impressed with the fact that we’re impressed with his work.
He’s very humble,” said UCLA alumna and elementary
school teacher Hirout Dagnew.

Everyone present at the mural-making workshop could appreciate
the formal, aesthetic qualities of Tesfaw’s paintings, like
the bold, bright colors he likes to use such as yellow and hot
pink, the sense of movement and their seemingly monumental
presence. Many of his paintings are extremely large murals with
life-size depictions. Tesfaw also seems to have the ability to draw
in an art viewer’s eyes through unusual techniques like
viewing a scene from behind, the truncation of figures, and fused
images.

But the Ethiopians in particular, who made up a good portion of
the guests at the workshop, have gained a greater sense of pride in
being Ethiopian with this exhibit. Silverman himself had been
greeted with many thanks from Ethiopians at the art exhibit’s
opening.

“One of the things that I began speaking with the staff of
the Fowler museum about very early on in planning the exhibition is
that it was very important for the Fowler to do what it could to
connect with the Ethiopian community in Los Angeles,”
Silverman said.

To accomplish this, the Fowler created a series of events
interspersed throughout the duration of the exhibit, like the
family mural-making workshop, a music and dance performance by
local Ethiopian church groups, a visit to Little Ethiopia and a
family festival of Ethiopian music, food and art.

“It’s extremely important that the exhibit be used
as a vehicle for people learning more about Ethiopian culture and
history,” Silverman said. “One of the things that drove
me to become a specialist in African art and African culture is
because this is a part of the world that Americans know very little
about, and often what they know is erroneous.”

Like many guests at the mural-making workshop, Iasu Gorfu, an
Ethiopian Engineer from Garden Grove, has brought along his three
children, and even a nephew. Gorfu had seen a flier one month prior
for this event at a festival in Culver City celebrating the
three-day holiday of Ethiopian Epiphany.

Gorfu’s 12-year-old son Jessie, upon sprinting up to the
mural, promised his father that he “(wouldn’t) mess it
up,” although later, upon leaving the room, he said, “I
messed it up really bad.” One of the men on the mural who
Jessie painted in looks like he’s wearing a brown mud mask
and smudged bright red lipstick. But 4-year-old Hannah Endawoke
ended up painting one man’s face completely over with red,
orange, brown and green paint.

The resulting mural may not be a masterpiece, but the event was
a success in terms of bringing some of the Ethiopian community
together and educating non-Ethiopians about Ethiopian culture. The
group of 21 guests at the mural-making workshop was diverse in both
ethnicity and age, with both Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians, and
also extremely young children as well as the elderly.

Observing her daughter paint the mural, Dagnew said she was
disappointed Tesfaw wasn’t staying longer in the United
States because she felt that this was an extremely important
cultural experience for the young in particular.

“I wish he would stay longer,” she said. “This
is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I would have loved to invite
all my nieces and nephews, especially those born here (in the
United States).”

But for Tesfaw, it was clear that his trip to the United States
was only a short visit, even though the museum and his traveling
companions made every effort to make him as comfortable as
possible. He ended up staying over at an Ethiopian Orthodox church
in Compton, where a church lady served him authentic Ethiopian
food.

And for all his other meals, his traveling companions provided
him with pasta, a food he is familiar with because of the Italian
influence in Ethiopia. They took him to the Olive Garden twice
because he liked it so much. He also found the spaghetti from the
Sbarro’s La Cucina on campus to be quite delicious as
well.

Before the workshop started, he joked that he might just stay,
but it was clear that there’s still no place like home for
him. He was looking forward to returning to Ethiopia, and now free
of the fear of flying, he was even looking forward to the flight
back.

Fowler Museum school and teacher service coordinator Gina Hall
said Tesfaw had been amazed at how he was able to be up in the
clouds and then come back down again. He told her it was really
miraculous.

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