Explore The Figurative, Colorful Works Of This Chicago Artist

A multidisciplinary artist born in Senegal, Modou Dieng Yacine arrived in Chicago after receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and teaching art at an Oregon college. “I wanted to move east and be closer to Europe and Africa and find more business opportunities in a larger, more diverse city,” he says. “Chicago is perfect. It’s a real melting pot and has major universities, art galleries and museums.” LUXE caught up with the artist to see what he’s been working on.

Your art is figurative and colorful. Tell us about your inspirations and process. I am very much inspired by the history of abstract art and Bauhaus architecture as well as my own postcolonial history in Africa and how it ties to my contemporary life. I contextualize history though archival materials found online or sometimes from residues of old archives. The process is fun and colorful, with lots of reuse of domestic materials such as cardboard, denim, canvas, burlap and even photographs.

Can you share more about the organization you co-founded, blackpuffin? Blackpuffin is a curatorial platform that facilitates collaboration and conversation among creators and curators from the African diaspora and their counterparts in the global art world. America can be a lonely, overwhelming place, and most young artists, especially of the African diaspora, don’t know where to start when they graduate. At blackpuffin, we facilitate their integration into the professional art world through our network of collaborators, friends and clients. We curate exhibitions for them, present their art at fairs and help their work get acquired by collectors.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve worked on? “Femme Noire,” an outdoor exhibition commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum and composed of reproductions of works by more than 20 Black women artists from the global African diaspora. I co-curated the exhibition with Larry Ossei-Mensah, an amazing curator based in New York.