The Passport to Paradise gallery highlights the bold, visual images found all over Dakar by focusing upon the urban visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement centered upon the life and teachings of a local saint named Sheikh Amadou Bamba.

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L?opold S?dar Senghor (1906-2002) and Pythagorus
Description: In this narrative panel from his Bel-Air factory mural, Papisto Boy portrays Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2002) and Pythagorus. “This is Leopold Sedar Senghor. Why did I paint him here? Because he is a great person, and has many accomplishments at the French Academy. He is known everywhere in the world,” Papisto Boy said. Written allusion is made to Senghor’s poem “African Night,” and the image of Pythagorus is from Papisto’s imagining of a Greek coin. Papisto’s signature style is to position one image next to another in an overlapping format, or to show figures in circular insets. Whereas Papisto always has his own reasons for his juxtapositions, his visual tactic allows viewers to make associations and intellectual linkages through surrealist “ironic collage.”
Publication Date: Publication Date Unknown
AODL Contributing Partner: Passport to Paradise
Copyright: Images and text courtesy of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and Drs. Mary Nooter Roberts (Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Fowler) and Allen F. Roberts (Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures and Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center).
Author: Author Unknown
Interviewer: Interviewer Unknown

Sampling from L'Institut Fondemental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN)

Phil Curtin Collection

Collection Boubacar Barry

Collection Charles Becker: Recherches et documents sur le Sida

Photographs from “Passport to Paradise’: Sufi Arts of Senegal and Beyond

Mosques of Bondoukou

Futa Toro, Senegal and Mauritania

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