CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/20/2022

'Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound' is a New Release this week!

In 1948, an Ivorian government clerk named Frédéric Bruly Bouabré received a “blue” vision that led him to invent a writing system centered around a new alphabet of 401 characters, each of which represented an aspect of his native Bété daily life. (Three of these characters are reproduced here.) He went on to make thousands of pencil and ballpoint pen drawings on many subjects both local and universal, from his own Bété culture to larger themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. More than 450 of these drawings are collected in Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound, the catalog to the exhibition currently on view at MoMA—the first overview of the artist’s work in North America.