Alexander 'Skunder' Boghossian, Ethiopian Artist, 65

[DGH]

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Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian, an Ethiopian abstract artist and
retired associate professor of art at Howard University, died May 4,
2003, the determination of the cause of death currently pending, at
his home in Washington DC, at the age of 65.

Mr. Boghossian served 29 years on the Howard faculty before his
retirement in 2001. For the last two decades, he had been widely
considered the unofficial patriarch of the expatriate Ethiopian arts
community in Washington.

His art, which he once described as a "perpetual celebration of the
diversity of blackness," has been displayed at dozens of art festivals
and shows around the world, in traveling exhibits and in one-person
shows. It currently is featured in an exhibition of contemporary
Ethiopian art that opened May 2 at the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of African Art.

Although Mr. Boghossian had not lived in Ethiopia for the last 33
years, his artistry remained deeply rooted in his Ethiopian heritage
and culture, and it was replete with ancient symbols and icons, said a
Howard University colleague, Abiyi Ford, a professor of film in the
mass media/communications department.

Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote in a 1983 review of a
Boghossian exhibit at Nyangoma's gallery on 18th Street NW that
Boghossian "summons in his art the spirits of his land. Or, rather, of
his lands . . . his moving, heart-felt pictures mix the American with
the African, the observed with the imagined, the ancient with the
new."

Mr. Boghossian was born in Addis Ababa in 1937 to an Ethiopian mother
and an Armenian father. In 1955 at age 17, he won a scholarship to
study art in London, and in 1957, he moved to Paris to study at art
academies there.

In 1966, he returned to Addis Ababa to teach at the Fine Arts School,
and he remained there until 1969, when he came to the United States as
resident instructor in sculpting, painting and design at the Atlanta
Center for Black Art, where he also was an artist-in-residence.

He came to Washington and joined the faculty at Howard University in
1972. For the next 29 years, he trained and coached generations of
students in the development of their artistic talents, while
continuing with his own artistic endeavors. His paintings were
described as both powerful and serene, effectively blending bright
colors, lines and images.

Mr. Boghossian's awards included the Haile Selassie I Award for Fine
Arts in 1965 and the Ethiopian Embassy's Excellence Award in September
2000. He had art shows in Paris, New York, Rome and London, and his
work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
Studio Museum of Harlem, the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building in Addis Ababa.

The exhibit at the National Museum of African Art, "Ethiopian
Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora," includes the work of Mr.
Boghossian and nine other expatriate Ethiopian artists. It runs
through October 5, 2003.