Ale Felege Selam

Ale Felege Selam Hiruy (July 31, 1923 – July 11, 2016), was an Ethiopian painter, muralist, and art educator, regarded as a pioneer of modern Ethiopian art and the founder of the country's first formal art school. Born in Fiche, Selale, he came from a line of church painters: his grandfather, Hiruy Woldegiorgis, was a leading painter in the reign of Emperor Menelik II who decorated the churches of Entoto Kidane Mihret and Entoto Raguel, and his father, Felege Selam Hiruy, and uncle, Em'aelaf Hiruy, were also painters; Em'aelaf's oil paintings of around 1950 are regarded by some as a turning point from traditional to modern Ethiopian painting. Encouraged by his grandfather toward the priesthood, he attended church school and was ordained a deacon. During the Italian occupation he was arrested as a youth and sentenced to death after a fight with an Italian servant, but by his own account escaped from the execution site by running into a valley under gunfire. After the liberation he moved to Addis Ababa, graduated with distinction as a machinist from the Addis Ababa Technical School, and received a scholarship from Emperor Haile Selassie to study in the United States, earning a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. After working a further year to save money, he spent three months traveling through France and Italy studying the work of the European masters before returning to Ethiopia in 1955.¹²³⁴⁵⁶

Back in Addis Ababa, he joined the Ministry of Education, where he prepared children's textbooks, and began teaching art to students he recruited from the city's high schools, holding classes at his home. Determined to build a school, he organized exhibitions of his students' work, inviting members of the royal family and foreign diplomats to buy, and raised some 75,000 Ethiopian dollars, which he presented to Haile Selassie as seed money. With the Emperor's support, the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School was inaugurated on July 23, 1958, Haile Selassie's 66th birthday, with Ale as its first director. Lacking Ethiopian artists trained to teach, he recruited foreign instructors through embassies, including Italian painter Vincenzo Fumo, Austrian sculptor Herbert Seiler, and German printmaker Hansen Bahia, and introduced modern methods of teaching drawing and painting based on his training in Chicago. He later hired Ethiopian painter Yigazu Bisrat and artists returning from study abroad, including Gebre Kristos Desta in 1962 and Skunder Boghossian in 1966, and took part in exhibitions of contemporary Ethiopian art in Moscow and Montreal. After the 1974 revolution he was pushed out of the directorship by the Derg, and the faculty elected Abdurahman Sherif to succeed him. He then worked for five years in the Ministry of Culture's heritage maintenance unit, restoring archives in churches and monasteries and helping restore church paintings damaged during the Italian occupation, including depictions of St. George, before resigning over disagreements with the government.^1237896

Known for realist landscapes, portraits, and murals that blended modern technique with traditional Ethiopian iconography, he often painted thoughtful, meditative subjects set against flat, dark backgrounds. His notable works include Portrait of a Man in White (1952), Portrait of a Woman (1961), and the wall paintings of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa. He also painted the churches of Gofa Gabriel, Merkato St. Michael, and Merkato St. Raguel in Addis Ababa, Kulubi Gabriel near Harar, and Medhane Alem Cathedral in Washington, D.C. From the early 1990s he lived in Adama, spending eight years painting the walls and dome of St. Mary's Church directly onto plaster, while also returning to teach at his former school. He designed posters, book illustrations, and postage stamps, including Ethiopia's Regional Hairstyles series of December 15, 1975, printed by Hélio Courvoisier in Switzerland. His work was exhibited in the United States, Germany, India, Greece, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.¹¹⁰³⁸⁶

He married Aster Kiflezgi in 1957; they had a daughter, Meseret, and a son, Tewodros, who died in Chicago in the 1970s while a college student. In 2010 the school he founded was renamed the Ale School of Fine Arts and Design, though he reportedly would have preferred it carry his full name; a 1999 portrait of him by his former student Tadesse Mesfin hangs in the school's collection. He died in Addis Ababa on July 11, 2016; his funeral was held at Holy Trinity Cathedral, and he was buried at Debre Libanos Monastery.¹³⁷⁶