A Protest Out of Africa : * Mohamed Omer Bushara’s stereotype-defying work reflects oppression in his native Sudan.

A chance meeting in Africa has affected the lives of two very different people. Sondra Hale, who teaches anthropology and women’s studies at UCLA, met Sudanese artist Mohamed Omer Bushara in Sudan in 1972. He was working at the Department of Culture in Khartoum.

She had first visited Sudan in the early 1960s, and returned after earning a master’s degree in African studies, to do research for her doctorate in anthropology.

Bushara, using everyday objects in his office--pen and ink, markers, matches and scraps of paper--was making small-scale drawings. Though they appeared whimsical, Hale also saw serious ironies in Bushara’s work.

The artist, then 26, had never shown his work to the public. Self-taught, he chose drawing as a way to convey his feelings about his culture.

“My contribution was professionalizing his life,” Hale said. “I convinced him to show his work.”

Two years later, he had his first solo show in Khartoum. Out of that show, he won first prize in a visual arts competition sponsored by African Arts magazine, and a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Hale is now introducing Bushara’s work to the West Coast with the exhibit “Mohamed Omer Bushara: Protest Art and Sudan, 1973-1993.” It was originally organized through Cal State Northridge’s Art Galleries and was scheduled to open there in February until the Jan. 17 earthquake closed the gallery. The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena graciously made space available.

Hale, who besides her adjunct associate professorship at UCLA chairs the women’s studies department at Cal State Northridge, curated the exhibit of more than 200 drawings, etchings, artist’s books and sculpture. Sabrina Lynn Motley, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UCLA and lecturer at Otis School of Art/Design, helped curate.

Hale and Motley see the show not only as a spotlight on Bushara’s work, but as a “test of our stereotypes” about African art, Hale said. “To walk in a room where there is no kinta cloth or baskets, and to think of Bushara, who is a Muslim, but doesn’t do the stereotype of (traditionally calligraphic) Islamic art. He does human forms. This is not a man apart from his culture. To have somebody think about African art differently would be enough for me.”

“Art in Africa has been dynamic and innovative and continues to grow,” Motley said.

Sudan, the largest country in Africa, gained its independence from Britain in 1956. It was the first sub-Saharan country to free itself from European domination. Nevertheless, the military has often governed the nation.

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Hale said Sudan is one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. Among its population of about 25 million are more than 500 ethnic groups, 110 languages and hundreds of religions and religious sects. However, an estimated 70% of the population is Sunni Muslim.

“In 1989, an ultraconservative, Islamist military junta came to power,” Hale has written in a curator’s statement. “Sudan is now an Islamic state, with sharia (religious law) in effect. All political parties, interest groups, unions and professional associations are banned, as were most of the newspapers.”

Bushara, reacting to the military dictatorship in the ‘70s and ‘80s, “was part of an outspoken leftist contingency in Sudan. He wrote art criticism, and illustrated political stories against the government,” Hale said. Feeling the threat to his artistic freedom, in the early ‘80s he left for Saudi Arabia, where he still lives.

Among the earlier works in the show is Bushara’s two-part “Seasons of Our Discontent,” a 1975 collaboration with Hale. Her haiku verse and his drawings convey the weight of oppression and political corruption on the people.

Bushara “likes to have people engage with him in his art,” Hale said, “to break down the notion of artist as estranged character removed from society. Anything that could be mass-produced serves his purposes. All objects in nature and society could be art. The stuff he did with coffee and sugar disintegrated. I would write him and say, ‘Bugs ate your art.’ ”

The 1975 “Self-Portrait” in the show was fashioned out of wood. “He said, ‘I saw this piece of wood on the ground, and it looked like me,’ ” Hale said. “He is the most unpretentious artist and intellectual. He’s political in the humanitarian sense of depicting poor, sad children, but his work is also comical and often beautiful, poetic and loving.”

But there are also the chilling etchings he did while at the Slade school (1976-77). The suggestion of death by torture and execution is omnipresent in these images. A soldier eats a person in Bushara’s 1976 ink-wash drawing from the “Political Series of Four.” In his most recent work, the human figure is becoming increasingly more abstract, each image less lyrical and quirky.

“For me, the art depicts political situations, but that’s just a depiction,” Motley said. “It becomes political when we walk out of here and do something about it.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Mohamed Omer Bushara: Protest Art and Sudan,” 1973-1993.

Location: Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena.

Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Ends April 24.

Price: Free. Street parking.

Call: (818) 792-5101.