The Art Village

We took a trip to two of the coolest places on Earth:

We only spent a little while at Mama Africa because the artist was not in, but we did get to see the work displayed. Here is some information on Mama Africa from accessgambia.com but I took the photos there:

'"Mama Africa' Women's Museum & Art Centre was opened in February 2010. The centre was founded and is managed by the celebrated Gambian artist Mrs. Isha Fofana who returned home after spending nearly 10 years operating her German gallery as well as making overseas displays. Her artwork is primarily done on large canvasses using vivid colours and she has painted and had exhibitions in Asia as well as Europe. 

The art gallery displays sculptures, paintings, and installations from artists working in the West Africa sub-region. It is part of a loose, worldwide network of Women’s Museums, initiatives and museums dedicated to women." 

The next place:

One of my favorite places in the world now is The Tunbung Art Village. It is located in the Tujereng Village in Kombo South aka 40 minutes from Happy Camp. I found a good brief description of the village on at accessgambia.com :

"The Tunbung Art Gallery & centre displays the painting works of the locally renowned artist Baboucarr Etu Ndow who also displays fine sculptured works which are discreetly and prominently displayed in various parts of the garden grounds of his work studio. Some are decorated in natural and vibrant colours such as ochre, mustard, bright blue and olive green.

Etu Ndow also runs special educational art workshops for students to encourage them to discover their creative side.

You can even stay at the gallery for a few nights in their purpose build traditional African mud huts in which the facilities are fairly sparse. There is a water from their local well placed in a receptacle, mosquito net over your bed and a lamp fueled by kerosene."

The man above is Baboucarr Etu Ndow. He is an amazing man and this is a manmade well that he himself created. He is so creative!

Etu Ndow is a professional tie dyer. He made the colors in a bucket, adding chemicals to the dye that had a very strong smell and we were told not to breath in but that it would never fade! He taught us some cool techniques to make amazing patterns and all our shirts turned out great. I was so surprised, I had never done a good tie dye before..

See they actually turned out good!

The whole village is incredibly relaxing. You're breathing in natural aromas (besides the tie dye chemicals... but that faded fast), everything is green around you and there is no sign of city life. There is no way anyone could ever be stressed out there. 

I'm not sure if you can tell but there is a chair up there in the tree haha I thought this would be the perfect reading spot. Too bad it was too wet to climb up there! Even though it was raining hard for most of our stay, I still loved it and can't imagine I'd ever wanna leave if I was there on a nice day!

We all hope to go back and stay the night there sometime before the end of our trip! I'd also like to go back to Mama Africa to meet the amazing artist. There's so much we wanna do, I hope it happens tho!