Talle Bamazi is an artist based in Columbus, Ohio, who, through his own work, his years as a curator and gallery owner, and as a mentor of younger artists, has been influential in raising the visibility of local African and African American artists.
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Born in northern Togo (West Africa), into the Kabiye ethnic group, Bamazi began his artistic career as an apprentice to his uncle, a traditional Togolese artist. Although he studied architecture in Lomé, he rapidly returned to
painting, and developed his own distinctive style bridging traditional African and contemporary modern art. After moving to the United States, he studied at the Art Students League of New York and earned a MFA at the New York Academy of Art. He is currently the lead artist-in-residence at the King Arts Complex, where his monumental series of life-sized portraits of Columbus-area black artists, formerly featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, now hangs in the historic Pythian theater.
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From 2004 until 2011, Bamazi operated a gallery called KIACA (Kabiye Impact Contemporary African Art), which was the only black-owned gallery in Columbus' noted arts' district, the Short North, and one of the few black-owned galleries in the city. KIACA served as an influential talent incubator for many Columbus-area African and African American artists, including psycheñwelic painter April Sunami.
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Bamazi's work has been featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, where he had a solo show in 2008 and an upcoming solo show ("The Flying Calabash Man") in 2020, as well as at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. His other solo exhibitions include the Columbus City Hall, Welancora, Karma and Brecht Forum galleries in New York and the Goethe Institut in Lomé. His work has also appeared in group shows at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the African American Museum in Hempstead, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, NY.
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In 2023, Ron and Erin Cole, of Cole Art Center, Gallery Luminaria, and Cole's Aircraft Aviation Art, based in downtown Zanesville, Ohio, opened a curated exhibition of Talle Bamazi's early original pieces. Valued at over 2.2 million dollars, all are available for sale in their Zanesville gallery, and many through their online store.
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