Moussa Gueye was arrested and tortured by the military government of his native Mauritania. Now the trained artist and architect delivers New Haven pizzas and washes dishes by night — while, by day, he’s an artist-in-residence with a lot to say about work, survival, and starting from scratch..
Gueye’s work and story comprise one of the centerpieces of White Collar, Blue Collar, Pink Slip, the Parachute Gallery’s wide-ranging but gripping new exhibition about the fragility and dignity of work. It runs at the Erector Square gallery through Sept. 18.
“I had to make a choice,” Gueye said, “when I came here. I could go back to school to work as an architect, or I could work to support my family.”
He chose the latter, Gueye said. His wife and three kids will join him later this fall, as his asylum application moves through the process. He hasn’t seen his family since 2003, when, Gueye said, the military government of Mauritania’s Mohammad Abdel Aziz threw him in jail on accusation of speaking out against the regime.
After five years in Iowa, where he had a Mauritanian friend, Gueye decided to move to New Haven to pursue an artist’s career, he said. “New York is the center of the art world, but it’s too crazy and expensive there. New Haven is nearby, and so I’ll make my home here.” He arrived in October, 2008.
IRIS (Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services) signed on as a co-sponsor of the “White Collar” exhibition along with Parachute Gallery and the Arts Council. It referred Gueye to curators Debbie Hesse and Joy Pepe. This is the first venue where Gueye will show his work to the public on an ongoing basis.
Art in this exhibition, said Hesse (in the photo with Gueye), reflects the current precarious conditions of survival across the whole economic spectrum. In the case of Gueye, she suggested, if the work you do to survive doesn’t give you meaning, then art can fill that void.
Moussa Gueye does not yet have any finished work hanging in the show itself. His contribution thus far is his articulate self as artist-in-residence. He will be working away, with an open door. Anyone interested in whether art is as essential in our lives as food, shelter, and work, would benefit from a visit.
Gueye said he uses art to educate people, to make the environment we share more beautiful, and also to fight depression.
“When I was an architect in Mauritania,” he said, “I had learned to draw, to do fine art, but really thought artists were crazy people. Now I don’t want to be an architect again.”
Gueye had a small show in Cedar Rapids and now is beginning to sell his acrylic on canvas paintings. “I could draw the dictator,” he said, “but why relive it that way? I’d have to re-experience it. I’d rather draw people in through abstraction. My biography is all there.”
Gueye is the only political refugee in the show. Most of the artists are, or have been at one time or another, vocational refugees, driven from jobs they wanted.
Rita Valley, for example, found a silver lining when she was canned, suddenly and unceremonially, from a framing job.
“Because I felt aimless, lost, and dependent, like a child,” she said, “I turned that experience into a kid’s coloring book.”
She called the piece “Color Me Jobless.” She revised it for the current show, and added a series of elegant Japanese-scroll shaped scarves of silk on which she created attractive versions of all her credit cards.
Why are they encrusted with beads and mirrors? “Why,” she responded, “isn’t that what the colonists used to buy Manhattan from the Indians?”
She also has on display ironic takes on her tax return, a crib sheet, which she has literally made by attaching a dozen credit card offers to a baby’s quilt, and another mixed media fabric cum credit card array that she calls “Security Blanket.”
For Valley, unemployment spawned a rich artistic vein to mine. Now she has a new job photographing antiques for auction house catalogs three days a week. She works on her art the rest of the time.
Several people at the convivial opening at the gallery asked her if she might do their credit cards on silk as well. Work!
The show features a large number of large-sized images of old industrial machinery (in the image with Hesse and Gueye) that appear almost tapestry-like, painted by Cindy Tower from discarded paint she found in a Dumpster. “Cindy likes the way the work is almost falling apart right here,” said Hesse.
In a more straightforward vein are haunting, documentary-style black and white photos of shut down and shrouded factory interiors by David Ottenstein, and color photographs of people at work by Lucas Foglia.
Westville artist Frank Bruckmann’s paens to the tenacity of small business owners dominates the back half of Parachute’s homey sprawling space. There one finds full-sized an image of John Cavaliere of Lyric Hall on Whalley Avenue, working away with a kind of old world intensity at one of his antique restorations. Bruckmann’s work, all quiet and dark hued, are reminiscnet of the social realism, with great subdued feeling, of Raphael Soyer.
While Moussa Gueye does not yet have any finished work hanging in the show itself, his contribution thus far is his articulate self as artist-in-residence. He will be working away, with an open door. Anyone interested in whether art is as essential in our lives as food, shelter, and work, would benefit from a visit.
White Collar, Blue Collar, Pink Slip, will be complemented in the fall by Out of House and Home, an exhibition on home and homelessness. For that show, Parachute Factory, which is operated by Yale’s Program for Recovery and Community Health, will partner with the Columbus House shelter.
Thank you, Allen, for writing this article, and your interest in and attention to this exhibition.