Second Generation Exhibition: On View Through May 31, 2024 in Monterey, CA

Project Presentation, April 24, 2024: The Eloquent Suri of Ethiopia: Storytelling, Advocacy and Action

Part of MIIS Earth Week, 2024: 12:15 — 1:30pm in the Atrium Gallery; MIIS community and public welcome; hosted by Dr. Netta Avineri, MIIS Professor, applied linguist and linguistic anthropologist

Turning the lens of Earth Week to a small ethnic group in the far southwest corner of Ethiopia, Mark Overgaard will discuss his McCone Atrium Gallery exhibit and its parent project – The Eloquent Suri of Ethiopia: People, Culture, Art, Language. His portraits of Suri collaborators are complemented by touching, Suri-created illustrated stories of Suri life and their intimate communion with nature, drawn from literacy primers. A key focus of the session will be a recently launched initiative to revive mother tongue education among this people and how compelling imagery (still, moving, and verbal) can contribute to that revival.

This exhibition presents the Suri, a small but resilient agropastoralist people in remote southwestern Ethiopia.

You’ll meet my portrait collaborators, many of whom painted their bodies using local natural pigments (continuing a long-standing Suri tradition), often with other adornments, too.

You’ll also learn about the Suri culture and language through posters in the exhibit. Poster content is drawn from a Suri literacy primer that was created starting in the early 2000s, when the written Suri language was initially being defined and refined. The stories and drawings in the posters were created by Suri members of that literacy project.

The second generation of this exhibit was initially hosted in subset form by The Forum at Rancho San Antonio in Cupertino, CA in April and May, 2023. A full version of the exhibit returned to the Pacific Grove Art Center for September and October, 2023. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, CA is the third formal venue.

Notable informal venues for this exhibit popped up in Kibish, Ethiopia during my 3rd visit to the Suri in 2023. Initially in our camp and then during our final weekend in a local school classroom, I shared a compact version of this exhibit with Suri visitors. They were often delighted to find pictures of themselves, their friends or family members. You can see glimpses of that Kibish exhibit in our Light of the Suri short film on the About the Project page.

More coverage of the second generation exhibit will be added to this page in the future. In the meantime, essentially the full content of the exhibit is available on the Cultural Portraits, Plus and About the Project pages of this site.

The framed limited edition images in this exhibit are offered in either their framed form (as exhibited) or as prints. See the Limited Edition Prints page for this project to learn more.

All proceeds from the sale of prints and framed images from this exhibition will be donated to the Light of the Suri mother tongue education project. You can also donate directly, of course.

This slideshow presents the main exhibit elements at the Pacific Grove Art Center on California’s Monterey Peninsula during March and April, 2021. The slideshow also includes a map that shows Suri territory and locates that territory in the context of Ethiopia and its African region, which is often called the Horn of Africa.

Acknowledgments

The Pacific Grove Art Center proved to be an excellent first venue for this exhibit. Gallery Manager Kim Moreno was very organized, flexible and helpful. Exhibit Preparator Mark Davy did an outstanding job of installing the exhibit, with the help of his father Herb, signage master.

Carmel photographer Rick Pharoah (rickpharoah.com) was ingenious in creating a set of installation photographs of the exhibit, conquering reflections and other gallery challenges with aplomb.