Born in 1961, Tivaouane, Senegal
Died in 2017, Lyon, France
Ndary Lo grew up near Thiès and first studied languages before enrolling at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, specializing in graphic design and communication. He graduated in 1992 and, after briefly experimenting with painting, turned to sculpture, choosing reinforcing steel rods as his preferred material. In 1995, he won the Goethe Institute Art Prize in Dakar—the first in a long series of distinctions: the Prize for Young Contemporary African Creation at the Dakar Biennale in 1996, the State President’s Grand Prize for the Arts in 1999, and the Léopold Sédar Senghor Grand Prize at the Dakar Biennale in both 2002 and 2008. Widely recognized in Senegal, his works also gained great acclaim in Europe and the United States. Having spent most of his life in Senegal, Lo moved to France in 2015 for medical treatment, where he remained until his passing in 2017.
Lo is best known for his marching men, his tributes to Rosa Parks, and his monumental walls of trees. His art reflects deep spiritual engagement—Lo believed profoundly in both God and humanity. His was an open, universal spirituality that permeated every aspect of his work, in both form and substance. Though a practicing Muslim, his reflections and sketchbooks reveal a curiosity about other religions and about major figures such as Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi.
This spirituality becomes evident in his immense figures, open to the sky, to the world, to God—their raised arms expressing a universal prayer, as the artist often said. In Lo’s work, flight is both literal and metaphorical: crowds advancing in tight ranks, figures reaching upward, a vision of ascent without risk of falling, an image of freedom, lightness, and transcendence. What might seem utopian or naive is instead a determined form of hope—a defiance of gravity, a dream of departure and elevation in spiritual, social, and political terms, as well as a childlike longing for escape and victory. As Joëlle Busca writes in Ndary Lo, le démiurge (2020), this aspiration to rise can be seen as death as liberation, a fall as elevation, or, as Lo himself put it, simply to “set Senegalese people in motion” through works like The Long March of Change.
Lo’s artistic journey was marked by a constant interplay between contemplation and action, stillness and movement—each generating and guiding the other. “I call my sculptures nit (meaning ‘person’ in Wolof). I don’t consciously know where they’re walking, but what matters to me is their movement. I’m obsessed with movement—things must move,” Lo explained. As journalist Roxana Azimi noted in her June 9, 2017 tribute in Le Monde, these welded silhouettes are “the sign of an optimistic, determined, and combative Africa. Just like him.”