MoMA to Present the First U.S. Museum Survey of the Ivorian Artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound Will Unite More Than 1,000 Drawings by the Artist from Public and Private Collections

NEW YORK, January 7, 2022—The Museum of Modern Art announces Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound, the first in-depth study in the United States of the Ivorian artist who used drawing as a critical tool to invent a writing system. On view from March 13 through August 13, 2022, the exhibition will explore the breadth of Bouabré’s decades-long career, featuring 11 series of drawings totaling more than 1,000 individual works, including his two best-known bodies of work, Alphabet Bété (1990–91) and Connaissance du Monde (1987–2014). World Unbound will be organized into two sections and connected with a chronology of the artist’s life and career that will include photographic images and archival materials. Although his work has been featured in major international exhibitions, World Unbound will be the first substantial monographic museum presentation in the US to celebrate Bouabré’s commitment to collecting, preserving, and sharing knowledge as a way of understanding the world around us. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound is organized by Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, with Erica DiBenedetto, Curatorial Assistant, and with the support of Damasia Lacroze, Departmental Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, #moma.

“Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s first museum survey in North America offers an exciting opportunity to introduce our audience to his drawings and their combination of indigenous knowledge and universal wisdom,” says Smooth Nzewi. “His obsessive cataloging and sharing of information through his art are complemented by an urgency to reflect the diversity and commonalities that bind our world.”

Born in Zéprégühé, Côte d’Ivoire, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014) started his career as a government clerk, but was inspired to make art after having a prophetic revelation in 1948. His artistic projects first explored and codified subjects including the folktales and philosophy of his native Bété #people. By the 1970s, he had dedicated himself fully to his drawing practice, which had become a vast exploration of ideas and subjects ranging from poetry to cosmology and secular humanism. Over the course of his lifetime, Bouabré produced more than a thousand works on paper.

Tracing the arc of Bouabré’s body of work, World Unbound will begin with the early days of his artistic career, when it revolved around recording and transmitting the history and knowledge of the Bété #people. Bouabré set out to invent a pictographic alphabet, creating the first writing system for the Bété language, which he accomplished with his Alphabet Bété (1990–91). On view in the exhibition’s first gallery, Alphabet Bété is the artist’s largest series, comprising 449 ballpoint pen and colored pencil drawings based on everyday Bété life. Perfected over several decades, each image correlates to a monosyllabic Bété word. The center of the gallery will present an interactive installation that allows visitors to digitally experience Bouabré’s original Bété script system. In addition to the digital activation, the first part of the exhibition will also present works portraying Bété folktales and mythologies, such as Mythologie Bété “Génie Guié Guié Guié” “Genie couvert d’yeux” (1991), a single drawing that portrays a fabled genie covered in human eyes. For the artist, the written language was the ultimate tool for preserving cultural memory and conserving oral history.

Further information in the press release to download