Away from Africa

Last Monday was one of those days when my professional life joins my personal life and passions. Tesfaye Tesseme at King Towers I visited the Manhattanville Housing Development to see the Senior Center 's art program, coordinated by Tesfaye Tessema, a NYCHA art consultant, who also happens to be an internationally recognized painter of Ethiopian origin. From there, I went on to King Towers, to see the children's art program that Tesfaye also teaches. Painting at Manhattanville Senior Center The King Houses Community Center director, Dawn Foster, is of Jamaican origin, and her spouse is Egyptian. The Center's children are of a variety of origins: Jamaican, Senegalese, Puerto Rican, etc. By the time I was done, it was too late to return to the office, so my friend and I walked towards Park Avenue on 116th Street, looking for a place to have a cup of coffee. We found a Moroccan hookah restaurant, " The Kiosk ." Instead of coffee, we had North Afric...

W hen we were living in Cameroon, we often worked with people from the family circle and the neighborhood, but at other times, we also had the pleasure of collaborating with talented people we met by coincidence.  As architects, we worked on a variety of projects. One of them was the renovation of a university restaurant in West Cameroon, in the Grassland region.   The original building was from the Soviet-era, in a rather "squarish" architectural style. Epee Ellong, a Cameroonian architect, was able to "Africanize" it by adding mosaic panels on the exterior walls.  As for the inside, there were large empty walls, so we suggested that a modern artist come and decorate them with frescoes. We thought of  Koko Komegne , whom we had met a short time before; he assured us that large-scale frescoes would not pose a problem. As it turned out--we didn't know this before Koko won the bid--Koko is from the same area the building was located in, so he was espe...