The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMOCA) will be unveiling a commissioned stone sculpture of Faisal Abdu’Allah, professor of printmaking and the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art at the UW-Madison, on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 5 p.m. in the MMoCA lobby in downtown Madison.
The art piece, Blu³eprint, is carved from limestone and features Abdu’Allah seated in a Belmont barber’s chair. As a barber and educator, Abdu’Allah features the barber chair as a space of learning for men like himself. Abdu’Allah spoke with Madison365 about the piece and what he hopes audiences learn from it.
“A lot of the artwork I’ve created over the years, has signs and symbols embedded in them,” said Abdu’Allah. “I always use materials and certain science as a way of encrypting things in work. The word Blueprint has the power three on top, because when you look at the word, embedded in that word, you can spell a word called Ubuntu … and Ubuntu is a Swahili word that talks about who we are as human beings. It translates to say a person is a person to other people. For me, it was really, really important to look at the holistic approach, as I’m creating this, what I would consider a very important object that’s going to be in public space. And in some way, I was using my body, a home that people are familiar with, the barber chair, to create this fitted seated figure.