Ficre Ghebreyesus 1962-2012

While Ghebreyesus turned down most opportunities to show during his short lifetime, posthumous solo institutional exhibitions of his work include Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California and POLYCHROMASIA: Selected Paintings by Ficre Ghebreyesus at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut. Galerie Lelong began representing the Estate in 2019 and held the solo exhibition Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue in 2020. In 2022, Ghebreyesus’s work was showcased in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams. His work has also been recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California. Works by Ghebreyesus can also be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir, The Light of the World (2015), chronicles her husband Ghebreyesus’s life and work.

Ficre Ghebreyesus was born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1962, and died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2012.

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