Zenith Gallery is excited to present “Movers and Shakers,” featuring two exceptional artists: Washingtonian painter, Preston Sampson, and Malinese wood sculptor, Ibou N’Diaye. Honoring and celebrating life, spirit and ancestry, each uses two distinctly different media and technique to represent the collective human experience that flows from the past to the present. 

Ibou N’Diaye is a traditional Malian sculptor who came from a region in Mali known as “Dogon Country”, which is known as a center for African Sculpture. Ibou learned to sculpt using traditional tools such as hatchets, chisels, files and adzes. He prefers to work with very hard woods, such as ebony and mahogany, and combines both modern and traditional imagery in his sculptures. Ibou first came to the United States in 1999, and has shown his art in many galleries and juried art exhibits. He also worked as a “Teaching Artist” for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and has also worked as an artist-in-residence at several Universities.

Ibou says of his work, "When I sculpt, I am recovering hundreds of years of lost harmony of the people. In the past, people were proud of their work and did it with skill and power. People recognized of what you are capable. We have lost this belief. It is up to us the artists, to recover the harmony we held in the past. My art is a call to all who love harmony in the world. I want them to think of it again and share it with those who have lost this harmony. My sculptures embody this rediscovered harmony. It isn’t something I invent, it is innate. When I work, it comes out of me to touch others and try to speak to them. My sculptures speak my truth." 

University of Maryland Fine Arts graduate, Preston Sampson, combines the skillful use of acrylic paints and vigorous broad brush strokes to create a canvas pulsating with rhythm and movement. A jazz enthusiast, Sampson's most exuberant paintings are the expansion of melodic ideas. He sees his figurative portrayals as attempts "to emote, to touch, to move you to the center of it all, to enable you to feel certain changes, like fleeting moments of memory."

Sampson has been featured in numerous national publications such as: Town & Country, Playbill, American Visions, and Black Enterprise magazines. He has been critically recognized in the Washington Post for his first retrospective at the University of Maryland in 1997, and in the International Review of African American Art comprehensive guide for collecting in 1998. A major breakthrough came in 1997 when he was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to create a painting for their award winning ad campaign. Absolut Sampson has been a part of a traveling collection which has made stops in Miami, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.