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at the school, eventually becoming head of painting. In the early 1960s, like many North African and Middle Eastern artists of this generation, he moved to Italy for graduate study. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, he was trained in a range of new methods, including mosaic, fresco painting, and printmaking. He attributes this period to the diversification of his two-dimensional practice, and turn, especially, to printmaking. After returning to Khartoum briefly, Khalil moved to New York in 1967, where he still lives and works. While his practice spans multiple media in two dimensions, including collage and painting, he is most well-known for his richly textured prints. He is also a master printmaker who has created prints for artists such as Louise Nevelson and Romare Bearden. Combining Western modernist influences (like Miro and Rauschenberg) with what he termed an “African sensibility,” Khalil’s oeuvre presents a modern African subjectivity, shaped by his movements between Sudan and the West, and the intricate, suprapersonal, and ongoing experience of diaspora.1 Upon arriving in New York City, Khalil studied and worked at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, a seminal institution for printmaking and graphic arts in the United States that was founded in 1948. Like many associated with the Workshop, Khalil began to combine printmaking methods in single compositions, using silkscreen over etching or collaged elements with lithography. Through the late 1970s, all of his work was in black and white, utilizing a range of print techniques to ruminate on the two tones and their contrast. He also incorporated found objects and debris found on the street in dense, complex assemblages that reflect upon the lifecycle of the city. In an interview with the artist Camille Billops in the mid1980s, Khalil spoke of his black-and-white compositions as concerned with African identity but without “obvious African or Moslem (sic) iconography. Some have said that it is not really African.”2 In works like Bomb Cantata (1968) [PL. 40] and The Second Queen (1974) [PL. 42] marbled black ink swirls in different densities, tones, and textures, reading like granite or lava. For Khalil, the color black expands to hold many concurrent meanings, both social and formal. As he put it: “In blackness, I see degrees and shades of rich, complicated color, more intense than in other colors, roaring and loud.”3 —ECF 1 2 3
Camille Billops, “An Interview with Mohammad Khalil,” Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 1 (1988): 65. Ibid. Charbel Dagner, Mohammed Omar Khalil: 50 years of Printmaking (Bahrain: ALBareh Art Gallery, 2013), 89, http://www.contemporarypractices.net/essays/ volumeXIV/Mohammed%20Omar%20Khalil.pdf.
