Episode 267

Image courtesy of artist

Ep.267 Modou Dieng Yacine. Born in Saint-Louis (Senegal), Modou Dieng Yacine studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Dakar (Senegal) and later earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in California.

He currently lives and works in Chicago and is also active as a curator/co-founder of the curatorial company Blackpuffin. Dieng Yacine works across painting, photography, collage, and mixed media. He often uses non-traditional materials such as denim, burlap, cardboard, vinyl records, archival prints, and hybrid materials layered onto surfaces.

He explores spatial/architectural motifs, layering of materials, de-construction of façades, and reveals negative space (cut-outs, hollows) as a strategy. Major themes in his practices are identity, migration, postcolonial history, architecture & habitat, and the intersection of African and Western cultures. Dieng Yacine references the notion of asymmetrical parallelism (a term from poet/philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor) to describe rhythmic repetition in time/space, which he applies in his compositions. The structure of the canvas itself often becomes part of the message (e.g., exposing stretcher bars, hollows behind façades) to comment on erasure, grief or absence.

Modou Dieng Yacine is represented in numerous collections, among these are the collections of the Studio Museum in New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, Gervanne and Mathias Lerind Collection in Paris, Kranzberg Foundation in St Louis, Fondation Gandur in Geneva and Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen.

Artist as Curator Blackpuffin.co

193 Gallery https://www.193gallery.com/fr/artists/62-modou-dieng-yacine/

ICI https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/22963-modou-dieng-yacine

Specta https://www.specta.dk/modou-dieng-yacine

Dakart News https://dakartnews.com/2025/05/02/modou-dieng-yacines-poetics-of-memory-and-identity-interview/

Artsper https://www.artsper.com/fr/artistes-contemporains/senegal/117864/modou-dieng-yacine

Povos Chicago https://povoschicago.com/usr/documents/exhibitions/list_of_works_url/33/steve-doc-modou.pdf

Laboratório de Actividades Criativas https://lac.org.pt/en/roots-2025-modou-dieng-yacine-sn/

Meer https://www.meer.com/en/97714-i-will-go-where-your-music-takes-me-dot-dot-dot

Artisanal Metals https://artisanalmetals.com/2025/05/05/from-dakar-to-venice-the-postcolonial-art-journey-of-modou-dieng-yacine/

On-Art Media https://www.onart.media/evenements-autour-de-lart-contemporain-africain/black-venezia-une-exploration-artistique-de-modou-dieng-yacine-a-la-193-gallery/

Pilchuck https://www.pilchuck.org/workshop-staff/modou-dieng-yacine