Seyni Awa Camara Dead: Senegalese Sculptor Has Died

Seyni Awa Camara, a sculptor whose clay creations made in a distant Senegalese city captured the European artwork world’s consideration within the late ’80s and gained an enormous following within the many years afterward, has died. DakArt Information reported Camara’s dying on social media on Sunday. As a result of Camara’s beginning yr has not definitively been reported, ARTnews was unable to find out her age.

Working in Bignona, the Diola artist gained worldwide recognition for her totem-like clay sculptures composed of stacked human our bodies. The works had been steeped in Camara’s spirituality, with the artist often drawing inspiration from a ram’s horn adorned with cloth she labeled a “genie,” in line with André Magnin, a gallerist who helped introduce her to Europe.

“She talks to it and asks for permission to make new items,” Magnin told Artsy. “[Her community] hides her works as a result of, in Bignona, her sculptures are scary. Seyni can be scary.”

Working beneath the signal of Wolof gods, she believed her work was invested with the ability to heal. She passionately labored over the surfaces of her sculptures for extended durations, in line with Maureen Murphy, a scholar of African artwork, and harvested her clay from swamps, later combining it with shellfish she personally floor. She would then fireplace her sculptures open air and sometimes add twigs and branches.

As a result of Bignona residents had been afraid of those works, Camara needed to rely totally on a global viewers to fund a residing. “Folks don’t know me in my very own nation. I survive due to foreigners’ orders,” she mentioned in 2006. “They purchase my work after which they go away. My very own nation ignores me. They don’t know who I’m.”

Her worldwide fan base ranged extensively. Singer and songwriter Pharrell Williams included Camara’s work in a 2025 exhibition that he curated for Perrotin gallery, and sculptor Louise Bourgeois sang Camara’s praises. Michael Armitage, a British artist born in Kenya, included Camara’s artwork alongside his personal work in a 2022 White Dice exhibition.

Throughout the evaluations, press releases, and essays revealed about Camara’s work, her beginning yr has assorted, although most agree she was born someday round 1945. She was a triplet, and in line with the lore relayed to Westerners, she and her brothers disappeared into the forest once they had been 12. 4 months later, they reemerged, having gained a brand new information of the way to sculpt clay via their communion with beings within the woodland. She mentioned her brother Allassane got here again holding a sculpture that he had made.

“They couldn’t consider that it was the gods who had taught us to make this pottery,” Camara mentioned in 1994. “Nobody within the village had ever seen statues like mine. They needed to know who had taught me to do this sort of work, everybody was afraid of it.”

Camara began making sculptures when she was six years outdated, and her craft solely deepened upon her return. However when she was pressured to marry an older man at age 15, her inventive follow ceased. In response to Murphy, she acquired pregnant 4 occasions however by no means gave beginning and fell severely ailing with an unspecified ailment that required a surgical procedure.

After she left her husband, she turned to sculpture as a monetary lifeline. Relatively than producing her work for exhibition, she bought her sculptures at native markets. Through the early ’80s, the anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi noticed Camara’s work at one among these markets. In 1988, she instructed Magnin about Camara’s work.

Magnin was on the time assistant commissioner of “Magiciens de la Terre,” a 1989 exhibition at Paris’s Centre Pompidou that’s now thought of each groundbreaking and flawed. Developed as a response to the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s controversial 1984 present “‘Primitivism’ in twentieth Century Artwork: Affinity of the Tribal and the Fashionable,” curator Jean-Hubert Martin’s “Magiciens de la Terre” gathered 50 artists from the West and 50 artists from what’s now termed the International South. Camara was among the many artists who discovered fame via the present, which has since been criticized for making African artists seem mysterious, alien, and magical for the amusement of Western audiences.

Not like many of the European artists in “Magiciens de la Terre,” Camara had by no means been to artwork college and even proven a lot in museums. For some, that made her work thrilling.

“She loved or missed the privilege of going to artwork college (a blessing in disguise),” sculptor Louise Bourgeois wrote in 1996. “However there want be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in model.”

Furthermore, Bourgeois wrote, “I acknowledge her originality and a sure magnificence. Now, magnificence is a harmful phrase as a result of notions of ‘magnificence’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work offers me pleasure to take a look at. As one artist to the opposite, I respect, like and luxuriate in Camara.”

Camara’s work has since entered institutional collections, together with her sculptures now within the holdings of the Tate museum community in London and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Her artwork is at the moment featured in “Venture a Black Planet: The Artwork and Tradition of Panafrica,” a wide-ranging survey of Pan-Africanism that debuted in 2024 on the Artwork Institute of Chicago and is now on view at MACBA in Barcelona.

She continued working via final yr, exhibiting Dak’Artwork Information a brand new terracotta piece that includes a pregnant girl carrying a water-filled vessel on her head. Of that work, she mentioned, “This girl represents the African girl.”