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Ezra Wube

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When We All Met by Ezra Wube

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I came from the sky by Ezra Wube

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Ezra Wube

Ezra Wube paints in Manhattan. His studio is a large space, located on the second floor of Hunter College’s Fine Arts department, on 41st and 10th Avenue. In one corner of the room, next to the window, a paint-speckled Macintosh computer sits on his desk, facing the only other items in the room: a wooden chair, a dusty couch, and an old, grey bicycle that has, since this interview, been stolen. Four unfinished paintings hang on the studio’s white walls. Their figures evoke a sense of movement, and perhaps restlessness—where they are going is not clear, only that they're moving.

“I think it’s an indirect reflection of my life. I have been moving around for the past ten years,” Ezra said. Soft spoken and dread locked, Ezra currently lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.  He weighs his words carefully as he gestures at the paintings from his seat. “For me, there is something about people and movement. The movement is often more interesting than the getting there. I like the fact they are going to it. When you go somewhere, the space and time doesn’t really matter. Only the journey.”

Born in Addis Abeba, in a neighborhood close to Merkato, Ezra attended high school at Yekatit 12 (Menen) before moving to the United States. He was eighteen at the time. Over the following ten years, he's produced a series of works that draw on memories from his past, in both painting and animation. Ezra is currently completing his MFA at Hunter College.

“Initially I was inspired by people like Diego Rivera. I was always concerned with politics and human rights and my art was very, very literal and straightforward. It was too literal in a way. Then I started doing art inspired by jazz, just abstract.” As time passed, Ezra wasn’t satisfied.  “The abstract paintings explored formal issues, like shapes and colors, but eventually I wanted to focus more on content based art.”

Traveling is Movement

“Moving to New Hampshire was a bit overwhelming. Because I was from Addis, I wanted something that was urban.” Ezra remembers the day his father picked him up from Boston’s Logan International Airport after arriving to the States.  The drive to Portsmouth was “trees and trees and trees,” Ezra reflects. “The experience for me was this silence, empty and peaceful.”

At the University of New Hampshire, Ezra considered studying Architecture or Computer Science. He was, however, "hooked", after taking one drawing class. His teachers were supportive, and he received a full scholarship as a graphic design major after applying to the Massachusetts College of Art. “I wanted to take a painting class, but I was told I had to add the major to do so, so I had a dual major in graphic design and painting.” He spent nights in the studio, painting with friends. “Design is very organized and linear and very direct. All about communication. Fine art is chaos.”

There was a period when Ezra was taking eight classes a semester, enough of a load for two semesters worth of classes.  The University's departments for Fine Arts and Graphic Design were located on adjacent lots, so Ezra walked back and forth between the two buildings.

Traveling is Movement: Teret Teret

One summer, Ezra and his girlfriend, Jolie, spent three months traveling the west coast. They flew to Colorado and from there, hitchhiked to Utah, Wyoming, and California, spending a month camping in a forest retreat that had no electricity. Just nature. “It snowed in late June in Utah, and all I had was a hoodie.  Tons of snow, imagine.”  It was Ezra's first introduction to traveling extensively for a long period of time.  He was 22, and after spending a few months of the road, he started painting figures that were just walking.  “Something about it was very true for me. All the experimental stuff that I was doing, like the jazz stuff and the political stuff stopped resonating. Something about people and movement just made sense. It felt right.”

Since then, he’s spent months in Shaolin, China, at the Shi Xiao Long Martial Arts Academy, studying various disciplines, including stick fighting, walking cane fighting, Tai Chi, and three different forms of Kung Fu, in addition to already being a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

In 2004, Ezra, along with Jolie, received Dondis A. Dondis Travel Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art, to collect folklore throughout Ethiopia. “It was amazing. We stayed for four months and traveled around the country—it was easier than I thought.”

Their procedure was simple. Ezra and Jolie would enter a town, asking a child who the local storyteller was. “We had a camera and a sound recorder. We would go on to their homes. Sometimes we'd have translators.”

The kindness of the people they visited humbled Ezra and Jolie. Their hosts shared stories and whatever they had, coffee or a little injera with mitmita. “I could tell the storytellers really wanted to share stories,” said Ezra, “they felt really nostalgic about it.”

 Ezra and Jolie recorded the stories, often struck by how some narratives repeated, unchanged, in different locations. Other times, the same story appeared, warped only just a little. It was as if the moral of the folktales never changed, but the details were different. 

“Some of the folktales we collected were very poetic; others, whimsical. Some of the stories never reached a conclusion, there was no moral to the story.  It was in the telling, the end didn’t matter.  For example, in Harar, the story would go: ‘There were two brothers. One had a moon on his head, and the other had a sun.  One had a son,’ and the story would evolve into stories about the son.  They were imaginative and surreal.  The stories would go on and on. They were full of imagination and very, very long.” In some towns, people found the stories difficult to remember. Ezra explains, “Because nowadays kids don't ask about stories as much, so sometimes they would forget and try hard to remember.”

Memories and Ethiopia

Ezra returned to Ethiopia in May, 2008, to gather more folktales from the places he did not get a chance to see the last time he was there. He visited Jimma, Nekemt, Ambo, and Choche, the birth place of coffee.

“The first time I went back I realized that I really became different in some ways. The sense of identity and home became very different. Things changed in Ethiopia and I changed in Ethiopia. Life became more complex in a way.”

Ezra rarely specifies time and place in his work. Rather, his figures move in an erased or fragmented space, displaced and in mass, in what he refers to as a "post-apocalyptic" environment. He began drawing as soon as he could hold a pencil: stick figures, and stuff he saw on television. A guy reading the news. People fishing, lots of war. “I used to like a lot of war movies. I drew helicopters and war scenes.” Ezra says he owes his success with his earliest artworks to his mother. When she saw his affinity for drawing, she bought him a pack of white paper and demanded he draw two pieces a day. He was six years old. “It was keremt, I said eshi.” “She was very strict,” Ezra smiles at the memory, “technically, I really got better.” By the time Ezra entered the second grade, he was so good, that whenever teachers wanted to illustrate something on the blackboard, like a complicated science illustration, they would turn to Ezra.

From stick figures to classroom illustrations, Ezra progressed into painting church icons, which he would give to people as gifts. "I was attracted to renaissance and the baroque period paintings; the fold of the clothes, the theatrical body language and symbolic coloration.” As a young artist, Ezra used food coloring to paint.  “I had red from flowers.  Yellow from turmeric, and green from leaves.” By combining one or more colors, he’d come up with even more colors.  Brown. Black. Orange.  “Nothing stopped me.  I always did it.  I naturally did it.”  To this day, Ezra uses coffee in his paintings. 

Between ninth and twelth grade, every Wednesday, Ezra and a few other art students would meet for two hours after the end of the regular school day for Art Club.  "We would work on still life, landscapes, portraits, drawings, and paintings. My teacher, Tulu Guya, whom I got to see when I went back, would really encourage me." His friends used to remark at how Ezra used to hold the pencil so tight.  "Eventually, I learnt how to hold a pencil in different ways in order to have varied marks." 

Experimenting with Animation and New Media

Ezra's work is replete with references to tradition and modernism, past and present, and how those ideas triangulate between ideas of memory.  His animation brings this tension to the fore. In his animated works, Ezra creates each frame by drawing a figure, taking its photo, and then erasing it to draw another figure again on top of the same surface.  In this way, the viewer can simultaneously see the work's past and present, since the erasure process doesn’t completely erase everything smudge marks always remain.  

Ezra describes the marks as the remnants of memory, something that always stays between the drawing and animation and is an outcome of its very process. He feels a sense of connection to this. He explains, "I cannot erase my past.  It’s important that I’m here but I am also defined by somewhere else. I’m defined by my memory and my past as well as my present. My Ethiopian memories make me who I am....When one sees a time based work, one can only make sense of it from memories. I think of my animation as a stream of consciousness, transparent to how I think."

For more Ezra Wube go to http://www.ezraart.net