Abdoulaye NDoye

Abdoulaye Ndoye was born in Dakar in 1951.  He works in the media of painting, printmaking, ceramics, and design.  He received his formal education at the Académie Royale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Brussels, Belgium from 1978 to 1981.  He has done residencies and workshops here in the United States at Brandywine Printmaking Workshop, Rutgers University and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York, as well as, in Senegal, Belgium, and Morocco.

 From 1982 to 1996 he was a professor at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts du Senegal and director from 1996 to the present. Mr. Ndoye has shown his works in numerous group and solo exhibitions both here in the states and internationally.  He is credited with performing lectures and presentations in the United States at numerous colleges and universities.

Mimi Wolford, Director of the Mbari Institute speaks of Abdoulaye Ndoye’s work, “he arrived at his present technique through a wonderful melding of processes.   From 1993 he would spend some of each of the next three years making woodcuts at Bob Blackburn’s studio in New York City.  Then in 1995, while attending a workshop in Kolda, a village in Senegal, he began to experiment with henna and became totally absorbed with the medium.  Subsequently, in 1999 he attended a lithography workshop at Brandywine where he began his writings - henna would become the background for these writings.  For Abdoulaye, it was a “meeting” of the two media.”

“Born from his woodcuts and love of carving, came the incredible wooden books and boxes.  This is a natural evolution – if you talk about writing, you talk about lines, you talk about pages, and you think about books!  Paper is wood, there is no difference between paper and wood.”