Work of influential Senegalese artist on display at IUAM gallery

The work of Kalidou Sy, a Senegalese painter and former Bloomington resident, is on display until May 20 in the IU Art Museum’s first-floor Special Exhibitions Gallery.\nSy’s work was the subject of a lecture by Joanna Grabski, assistant professor at Ohio’s Denison University, Wednesday night in Woodburn Hall.\nSy moved to Bloomington in 1997 to marry Eileen Julien, the chairperson of IU’s Department of Comparative Literature. He remained in town, except for a two-year stint in Maryland and annual trips to Senegal, until his death in 2005. \n“His style was unique to him,” Grabski said at the reception in the IU Art Museum’s atrium following the lecture. “He could find something most would consider junk and use it to make something beautiful.”\nThe first work Sy produced in Bloomington was “Portrait of Eileen.” He composed the piece with objects he collected while walking home from an IU football game with a friend.\n“His friend later told me that the only thing Kalidou was worried about during the entire football game was going home and finding stuff to use,” Julien said.\nSy was a catalyst of the Senegalese and African trend of “récupération,” said Grabski. Récupération is the technique of making art by reworking salvaged discarded materials. \n“Although many critics and exhibition viewers assume that récupération is a clever solution for the scarcity of art supplies in Africa, Sy proposed that récupération was less about using found materials due to necessity than it was about an approach to appreciating and interacting with the visual environment,” Grabski wrote in a pamphlet accompanying the lecture.\nIn her lecture Grabski emphasized the influence of Senegal’s capital, Dakar, on Sy’s work. She described Dakar as an “intensely visual city” and she said his work grew out of the dynamics of the art scene there.\nSy may have used mundane objects in his compositions, but he was not an amateur. Before being appointed director of the National School of Fine Arts in Senegal he taught at the National School of Art Education from 1979 through 1986. In addition to studying at both of the above schools in Senegal he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium. \n“Kalidou could paint portraits or landscapes,” Julien said, recalling two landscapes he did for friends. “But doing representations was not an exploration; he was always searching. For him art had an element of discovery, of trying oneself.”\nSy was an African artist, a “lucid nationalist” according to Julien, but he insisted that Africa was only one source of inspiration for him. This global consciousness is indicative of his understanding of the larger world of ideas, Grabski said during her lecture.\n“He was a very down-to-earth guy, very approachable, I enjoyed having a beer with him,” said Steve Ingle, a former neighbor and friend. “I’m not an artist or associated with IU but he treated me and the whole neighborhood as equals.”\n“Traces and Echoes: Mixed Media Paintings by Kalidou Sy” will be on display at the IU Art Museum until May 20 as part of the museum’s ongoing “African Art Today” series.\n“I think this series is very important,” Grabski said. “It will challenge the commonly held idea that all African art is traditional pieces like masks and shields.”