HOLLAND - Dr. Neal Sobania of the Hope College faculty has played a central role in a forthcoming exhibition in California featuring work by Qes Adamu Tesfaw of Ethiopia, including helping to introduce the U.S. art world to the artist.

The exhibition "Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw," will open on Sunday, March 6, at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History of the University of California at Los Angeles. The exhibition will also be featured in a companion 200-page illustrated catalog, and accompanied by a display of photographs featuring Ethiopia itself.

Sobania is a professor of history and director of international education at Hope. A specialist in the history and culture of Ethiopia and Kenya, he has been visiting and studying the region since the 1960s.

For more than a dozen years, he has been collaborating on research projects with art historian Raymond Silverman. Silverman is a professor of art history and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan and the curator of the Fowler exhibition.

It was during one of the two scholars' trips to Ethiopia more than a decade ago that they first learned of Adamu. Chronicling contemporary Ethiopian artwork, they had been impressed by the work of one artist in particular, but were initially unable to learn his identity.

In the end, they were introduced to him through an artist friend. At first they didn't realize that the man they had just met, Adamu, was the artist whose work they'd so admired, until Sobania had an opportunity to visit him at home.

"I walked into his house and all the walls of his home were painted, and I knew we'd found our unknown artist," Sobania said. "I went back to Ray and said, 'You won't believe it.'"

In the years since, Sobania and Silverman have made a point of visiting with him during follow-up research trips to Ethiopia.

"We always go back to see Adamu; we always interview him; we buy a painting or two from him," Sobania said.

Adamu, who is in his 70s, learned to paint as a boy while studying to enter the priesthood. He was ordained and earned the honorific title "Qes," but ultimately left the priesthood and moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, to paint full-time.

Adamu's paintings, Sobania noted, address three general themes: religion, history and contemporary life. The exhibition will feature examples of each theme, and will include four paintings borrowed from Sobania's personal collection, among which is a work showing England's Queen Elizabeth II and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie during a 1965 state visit.

In addition to the loaning of the paintings to the Fowler Museum, Sobania's direct involvement in the "Painting Ethopia" exhibition has included serving as lead writer of the captions featured in the catalog, presenting not only information about the paintings themselves but about Ethiopian culture and religion. Silverman is the publication's primary author, with additional contributions by Leah Niederstadt, who is a member of the faculty of Wolfson College of the University of Oxford and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University.

Sobania, Silverman and Peri Klemm of the faculty at California State University Northridge also provided the 35 photographs featured in the parallel exhibition "Ethiopian Crossroads: Photographs of a Land and Its People" that will run in the Fowler's Goldenberg Galleria. Sobania also wrote the captions for the photographs being featured.

Sobania is also pleased with initiatives related to the exhibitions. Additional copies of the catalog, for example, are being provided for use by scholars in Ethiopia, which he values as a way to help give back to the nation he has studied for decades. In addition, on the day before attending the March 6 opening activities he will make presentations on the history and culture of Ethiopia during the beginning of a multi-week teachers' workshop sponsored by the museum so that elementary and secondary educators can include lessons related to the exhibition in their classrooms.

The previous results of Sobania's and Silverman's long-time collaboration include the 1994 exhibition "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" at Michigan State University, which featured work by Adamu as well as several other artists; a book of the same name edited by Silverman and published in 1999 by the University of Washington Press; and the documentary "The Parchment Makers: An Ancient Art in Present-Day Ethiopia," produced in 2000 by Hope and MSU in cooperation with the Scriptorium Center for Christian Antiquities.

Sobania and 2003 Hope graduate Daniel Berhanemeskel of Aksum, Ethiopia, were centrally involved in developing the Smithsonian Institution exhibition "From Monastery to Marketplace: Tradition Inspires Modern Ethiopian Painting," which was displayed in the African Voices Focus Gallery of the National Museum of Natural History during 2002.

Sobania's interest in Ethiopian art began with his first visit to the country in the late 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer, and has continued ever since. His own collection of Ethiopian art was featured in an exhibition at Hope in the fall of 1992.

In keeping with his long-time interest in East Africa, he is also author of the book "Culture and Customs of Kenya," published in 2003 by Greenwood Publishing Group of Connecticut.

Sobania is a 1968 Hope graduate who has taught at Hope since 1981.

"Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw" will continue through Sunday, Sept. 18. "Ethiopian Crossroads: Photographs of a Land and Its People" will run until Sunday, June 26.

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