Collection: Papa Ibra Tall
Papa Ibra Tall (1935 - 2015, Sénégal) grew up in Tivouane, the bustling Senegalese center of the West African Sufi Islamic order of the Tijaniyyah. He gravitated independently toward visual art at young age and received early encouragement from prominent Tijani families, who invited him to execute charcoal drawings on public walls.
Young Tall was also shaped by his years at the nearby Ecole Normale Supérieure William Ponty, the Top colonial institution of higher education in French West Africa. As a student in the associated grade school, Tall received a top-quality education from some of French West Africa's brightest young intellectuals. Tall later enrolled at the Collège Maurice Delafosse in Dakar, where he first encountered publications reproducing impressionist and cubist art. After obtaining a brevet élémentaire (elementary certificate) in 1951, Tall attended Dakar's Lycée Van Vollenhoven, where prejudiced French administrators prevented him from studying for the baccalaureate exam, regarding him as a colonial subject who had no right to an advanced education.
This angered Tall but not deepened his resolve, and he found a way to prepare for the baccalaureate by correspondence, through the Ecole Universelle in Paris. While studying for this rigorous exam, which he passed in 1954, Tall became involved with the Académie Africaine des Arts Plastiques, a private, Dakar-based group of amateur, mostly French painters. In 1955, Tall left Senegal for Paris, where he spent two years at the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture. Yet art remained his passion. By 1957, he had changed direction and was studying and making pottery, decorative arts, tapestry, and fine arts at several different institutes and private studios throughout the city. He also belonged to the intellectual community surrounding the journal and publishing house Présence Africaine, and especially admired the Senegalese intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop.
Tall returned to Dakar in early 1960 to teach in the fine art section of the Ecole des Arts du Sénégal, a national institution founded in the spirit of the Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor's philosophy of Negritude, which had grown out of a loosely conceived anti-colonial movement calling for Black cultural rediscovery and international solidarity. In 1961, Tall founded a separate, Afrocentric studio art section within the Ecole des Arts called Recherches Plastiques Nègres. Aroung the same time, he began laying the groundwork for a new national art workshop dedicated mainly to the production of modernist tapestries; the workshop opened officially in Thiès in 1966, with Tall as its director.
Joshua I. Cohen in African modernism in America
