The Art of the Return with Bara Diokhané

Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week the podcast is coming to you from my recent trip to the Dakar Biennale where I met my guest, Bara Diokhané, thanks to Muhammida El Muhajir from EP27 (https://glocalcitizens.fireside.fm/27). Bara was born and raised in Dakar, Senegal. In 2018 he returned after an interesting career journey in New York. A lawyer by training, Bara Diokhané, started creating works of art at the start of the the 21st century, while living in Harlem, New York as an immigrant. In 2002 he was a participating artist to the MagnetDiaspora exhibit hosted during the 2002 Dakar Biennale by Yassine Arts Gallery. His first exhibition in New York City was hosted in 2003 by Steve Cannon's Tribes Gallery in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 2004 he designed the backdrop for the scene of the Afropop music festival at Virginia University. In 2005 he was selected at the Diversity Project, curated by Danny Simmons and Rush Arts, which was an event showcasing the works of 200 New York artists in 16 different galleries. In 2006, I showed 10 paintings at the Dakar Off Biennale where most of the show was sold out. He has also showed at the State Black Archives Museum, in Huntsville, Alabama; Kiaca Gallery, in Columbus, Ohio; Columbia University; and the Schomburg Center for research in black culture. In 2007, he was selected for the Black Madonna Millenium exhibit hosted at the Museum for Contemporary African and Diaspora Art (MOCADA) in Brooklyn. That year, he also showed at Princeton University's Rockefeller Art Gallery. In 2010 Bara was invited to select one artwork from the collection of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and couple it with one of his own works to make a pair during the "African Rythms, American Echoes" exhibit.
Bara is presently writing a script about an African human experience of 50 years of arts, politics and academics.

Where to find Bara?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Twitter
On Facebook

What's Bara reading?
The African Origin of Civilization by Cheikh Anta Diop

Other topics of interest:
Mor Faye
KoToa Coffee in Dakar
Doudou N'Diaye Rose
On Senegal's BDS party
First World Festival of Negro Arts
Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks