The Dagara Collection
The Medicine Art featured in the Dagara Collection brings the power of the ancient wisdom traditions of the Dagara Peoples of Burkina Faso, West Africa to life. Featured Artist, Mr. Traoré Oumarou of the Dagara Tribe, has devoted his life to studying, celebrating, and sharing the Dagara way of life with the world. We are honored to feature Traoré's first US-based exhibit and excited offer this powerful Medicine Art to awaken a deeper connection to the Wild, Nature, and Earth for your Heart, Spirit, and Soul to support your dreams and inspirations.
Collection Origins
Our featured one-of-a-kind paintings are created in Burkina Faso, primarily acrylic on canvas and other textiles. The paintings are shipped to the US where we digitize the artwork using state-of-the-art scanning technology, and create fine art quality prints using the highest quality paper and printing processes available.
The Dagara Collection is a partnership between From The Ashes, Zangala Foundation, and the artist Mr. Traore Oumarou, with a portion of proceeds shared with the artist and donated to Zangala.
Meet the Artist, Traoré Oumarou
Traoré is a self-taught artist, born on December 12, 1971, in Dano, Burkina Faso where he resides to this day. His journey as an artist is inspired by his deep passion for Dagara culture and youth education. He is a primary school teacher, and his career as an artist began through teaching art to children.
Quickly captivated by the love of painting, he has been refining his craft for two decades. His determination earned him his first exhibit in 2010 at the Goethe Institute with the theme, Art Takes a Stand, featuring works focused on Peace, Freedom, and non-violence in West African cities.
Traoré utilizes a variety of painting styles in his works, including Fauvism, Expressionism, and abstract art. He carefully applies his brushes to create spiritual and otherworldly ghostly forms, using art as a medium for raising consciousness and inspiring deeper awareness of the spiritual realms.
His creations are based on daily life and contemporary art with a spiritual connotation. Insecure is a theme that inspires Oumarou, as it directly relates to the current state of his country and even the world. He has woven this theme into a series of recent exhibitions titled "The World Turns" and "Sweeping," among others.
He believes visual art is a collective memory, and aspires to infuse his passion for Dagara and greater West African spiritual wisdom traditions into his artwork and the collective memory of the world.
His work as a cultural ambassador for the Dagara People lead him to a chance encounter with Mark Bockley, founder of Zangala, in the early 2000’s during Mark’s initial efforts to create a cultural reciprocity program to bring prosperity to the Dagara People in alignment with their cultural traditions, while also supporting and expanding the awareness and practice of Dagara traditions throughout Burkina Faso and the world.
The resulting project grew into the Zangala Foundation, which supports an annual Dagara-inspired Balafon Festival to celebrate and honor the Dagara traditional music, dance, ceremony, rituals, and other performance arts and crafts that are central to the Dagara way of life.
Traoré quickly proved himself as a powerful ally and local liaison for these efforts, and the annual festival has grown exponentially over the past 20 years as a result of his relentless passion to protect and promote Dagara traditional culture in Burkina Faso and beyond.
