Iba Ndiaye: Between Latitude and Longitude

Between Latitude and Longitude constitutes the inaugural exhibition in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing’s in-focus gallery, part of the complete major reenvisioning of The Met collection of African art. In celebration of the initiative, an artistic landmark work by Senegalese Modernist Iba Ndiaye (1928–2008), Tabaski, a gift to The Met, is being ushered into the collection. Since the 1982 opening of the Rockefeller Wing, a canon of African Modernist painting has taken shape, and Ndiaye emerges consistently as a foundational figure of international importance, yet his contributions remain largely unknown outside Senegal.

Born in Saint Louis to a Catholic mother and Muslim father, Ndiaye, upon his completion of a secondary education at the prestigious Lycée Faidherbe, left for France to pursue fine arts studies. On the eve of Senegal’s independence, he was summoned to Dakar by its first president, the poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, to establish a national school of fine arts. Tabaski was painted upon his subsequent return to France in 1970, where he remained the rest of his career. Its subject is the Feast of Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, known as Tabaski in West Africa, the second of the most important celebrations in Islam that honors the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God’s command. With this depiction, Ndiaye selected a notable subject in the history of art that he boldly represented as experienced within a West African context. At the same time, he does so in a painterly idiom adopted from his careful study and embrace of European old master painting. A partnership between Met curators specializing in African art and European paintings, this presentation introduces the work in relation to the artist’s diverse source material from across The Met, an institution that was a source of profound inspiration. Among the selection are works by Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Derain, and Bacon, along with key works of African sculpture, textiles, and metalwork, and Islamic illumination.