the Dakar visual art scene

With all this time stuck in Senegal, unable to travel to other countries, I decided to explore Dakar a little further - and was helped enormously by a city arts festival taking place in many different galleries around the city during December and early January.

The exhibits included both sculptures (like the cormorant above) and paintings, and kept me occupied and impressed for several weeks.  It also opened my eyes to some of the other artwork around the city - that freely available to all as it has been painted on the city's walls.

Such murals are everywhere, with some just pleasing on the eye, others quite clever (this macaw on the right is wearing prayer beads, and the woolly hat which is so common here on older men) - and of course some with political or social comment.

At the same time there was a series of posters appearing all over town, captioned "You are beautiful the way you are", each with a photograph of a person or group of people dressed in a way that doesn't fit the Western world stereotype of what is attractive - other than one on an underground platform labelled 'Europe', with a line-up of waiting commuters of different ethnicities.  Clearly an exhibition with a message.

Looking for further sources I even found a rather nice small stained glass window that seemed to be on the stairwell of a local hotel.

All of this showing how incredibly talented the Senegalese are.  The music from this country is rightly famous (even those not into West African music have mostly heard of Youssou N'dour and Baaba Maal) but the artistic talent really does extend to all the different forms of expression.