Skunder Boghossian
1937–2003 · Ethiopian Surrealist painter and professor
Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian (Addis Ababa, July 22, 1937 – Washington, D.C., May 4, 2003) was an Ethiopian painter and professor active in the United States. The son of an Ethiopian mother and an Armenian father, he was one of the first contemporary Black artists from the African continent to gain international attention, and his work blends Ethiopian visual traditions with the language of European modernism.
After early training in Ethiopia, he moved to Europe on a scholarship, studying in London at the Slade School of Fine Art and in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1963 the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris bought one of his works, and in 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his painting Juju's Wedding (1964). After returning home he taught at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, and in 1970 he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Howard University in Washington from 1972 until 2001.
His paintings began with biomorphic forms and minutely detailed abstract marks and later turned to bold, colourful geometric and African motifs. He drew on Ethiopian magic scrolls known as däbtära, on church wall painting and illuminated manuscripts, and on a compositional approach he called quflfu, meaning interlocked. Several works, such as Black Emblem (1969), The End of the Beginning (1972) and DMZ (1975), carry political themes linked to the Black Arts Movement in the United States.
In 2001 he completed Nexus, an aluminum relief for the wall of the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington. His legacy lives on in the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts, named after him, which is part of Ethiopia's oldest secular school network.