Now on View:

Harouna Saho

Through November 22, 2026

Our first student exhibition of the year features the work of Yale senior Harouna Saho, whose paintings explore place, distance, and perspective through scenes inspired by his journey from The Gambia to Oklahoma and, most recently, New Haven.

Opening Reception

Friday, October 30th

6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
This event is free and open to the public; no RSVP required.

Artist Statement

I'm drawn to presence more than argument. My figures aren't responding to a history, they're simply here, and I use the techniques of painting freely.

My subjects are family and friends, drawn from photographs, including images from The Gambia. I equate the body to a mask. In many West and Central African traditions, a mask isn't a symbol of something beyond itself, it's a vessel for it. I think of what a figure carries as a kind of light, not literal and not reserved for a chosen few. The paintings are where it gets remembered. Movement runs through all of it. I grew up in the United States with a home I could only reach through family, memory, and photographs, so I have always lived in two places at once. The distance between where I come from and where I am now is something I carry, and the paintings are where I work through it. 

The photographs are fragments of a place I know but can't always stand in. When I paint from them, I'm not documenting home, I'm traveling there and back. That is why I think of these worlds as third spaces. Each work is real and invented at once, pushed through the cartoons and anime I grew up on, where power becomes visible. They are neither memory nor invention, but both, and neither here nor there. They hold the reality I'm in now and the one I'm reaching toward, side by side. I rarely begin with a meaning. I work intuitively, in a state of play, where results stop mattering and thinking less allows full presence. A meaning always arrives. I set blue against yellow, stillness against movement. Old and new sit together, ancestral masks, oil paint, animation, a continuity from where I come from to where I am. Without play, none of this happens. -Harouna Saho

Find Harouna on Instagram: @roonart_