FRÉDÉRIC BRULY BOUABRÉ, World Unbound

96pp., 4to., b/w & colour illus., hardback, New York, 2022

Published to accompany the exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014) began his career as a bureaucrat in the French colonial administration in Côte d’Ivoire. He later reinvented himself as a writer and linguist and then as an artist, and developed a written syllabary for the oral culture of his Bété people. he then turned to drawing as a way to unite Bété subjects with all-encompassing themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. All but unknown, even in his home country, he found international recognition when he participated in the 1989 Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre.