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.