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MOR FAYE (1947-1984)

Mor Faye was a Senegal born painter whose short but intense art journey earned him the alias of"Saint", coined by New York writer Glenn O'Brien ( Art Forum, Summer 1991)..During the early sixties, he was part of the first cohort of art students trained by Paris based Senegalese painter Iba NDiaye, in the newly built National Art School, that proclaimed its ambitions to become  the launchig pad of the so called  "School of Dakar", and where he won many awards for drawing and painting.

When Senegal hosted the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, Mor Faye, at age 19, was selected as an participating artist, along Iba NDiaye, ,among other renowned artists from Africa and its Diaspora, at the exhibition "Tendances et Confrontations" that showcased  the contemporary art of newly independent Africa.

The new Republic of Senegal, a mostly Muslim populated nation, was led by the Leopold Senghor, the Catholic poet, who was the main political force behind the School of Dakar,, which he viewed as a window or a billboard for tis Negritude philosophy and esthetics.

In the decade that followed the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Mor Faye's work had been been present in most traveling collective exhibits 'Contemporary Art from Senegal" in Paris, Mexico, Canada, etc organized under the auspices of the Senegalese government. He supported himself by teaching art in different high schools

He then retreated into a long absence from the art scene, due to his rejection by the official canons of art under Negritude intermittent admissions into a mental institution,, while keeping his practice.

When he died of malaria at the age 37, he left an impressive quantity of works on paper that have never been exhibited . The first comprehensive exhibition of his work occurred posthumously  in 1991, in his hometown of  Dakar,capital of Senegal, seven years after his death. The impact of that historical exhibit  was not unnoticed, as his work was later selected at the Africa Pavilion of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, before being exhibited in 1994 at the exhibition "Fusion:West African Artists at the Venice Biennale, curated by Susan Vogel at the Museum for African Arts in New York.

In her introduction to the catalogue that accompanied the Fusion exhibit, Susan Vogel refers to Mor Faye as "arguably one of Africa's finest artist 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."