Die Mauerbilder des Papisto Boy in Dakar

Frankfurt Am Main und Paris: Qumran, 1980. First edition. 13 cards, photographically illustrated on beige card stock, with a booklet [8 pp. incl. covers], housed in a heavy black cardboard box photographically illustrated at upper panel.

First edition of theis obscure, beautiful documentation of the work of the graffiti and mural artist Papisto Boy, aka Pape Samb. Papisto Boy's work are channeled works in the Sufi tradition of the Mouride Way, inspired by Sheikh Amadu Bamba. The figures of Bob Marley, Lamp Fall, Jimi Hendrix, all feature prominently in Papisto Boy's work. His largest mural was a 600 foot long piece along a factory wall in Belaire, which Papisto Boy frequently repainted as a shifting palimpsest of portraits and graffiti, even as the factory owner threatened to efface the works.

Papisto was a prominent figure in the Set-Setal movement in the 1980's. In 2002 the fishing village in Dakar in which Papisto lived was razed, and he died in 2014 in the rural village he was born.

Papisto Boy's works were first exhibited internationally in West Germany in 1980, the year this box was published- which remains the most significant published record of his ephemera works, which were also featured in the exhibition A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, as well as the Urban Islam exhibition in Amsterdam in 2004.

Important and overlooked early documentation of an important decolonial graffiti artist. OCLC locates 9 holdings worldwide, but not a single example in North America.

Near fine.