our Mentor
Abba Yahudah Sellassie
An African Jamaican male with a feminist perspective, Abba Yahudah is a conscious visionary heart brother, deeply committed to the rebirth of the Goddess and with deep empathy for the suffering of black women, but also for the pain of the larger collective body of African people. The African Diaspora, Ethiopianism, mysticism, and the Rastafarian experience inspire his art and writings. He believes in the ultimate unity of all spiritual traditions, but as a Jamaican, unable to escape the Catholic and Baptist missionaries, he has been particularly influenced by Christianity. He could be considered a Gnostic Rastafarian in the sense that he has retained the jewels of truth in Christianity, but has radically dissected the false patriarchal ideologies that subjugate the feminine principle. He prefers to take history all the way back to the land of Ethiopia, where humanity originated from the primordial womb of the Mother.
He has felt the pain of his heritage and has spent most of his life developing an artistic identity that transcends borders, labels and stereotypes, not an easy task for an African Jamaican male.
Born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, to a family of artists and builders, Abba Yahudah early on vowed to devote himself entirely to art; making everything he did a creative exercise. By the age of ten, he developed a very detailed eye, showing remarkable skill with the pencil, and able to draw the identical likeness of anything he saw. He migrated to the United States in 1981 and at the age of fifteen took his first job as a sign painter, intimately exposing him to typography and layout. Several of his works were published in local and national media such as Sights and Sounds, The Apprentice Writer and Student Voice. While living in New York he enrolled in 1985 in Parson’s School of Design, majoring in graphic design. A year later, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, majoring in design and illustration. In 1987 Abba Yahudah was working as an art director/illustrator for one of the larger design firms in Manhattan. He designed and illustrated for companies such as Sony, Sharp, Revlon, Maxwell House, and Pepsi, to name a few. In 1996, he opened the first Rastafarian Gallery in Park Slope, Brooklyn, calling it Lalibela after the monolithic churches of Ethiopia’s New Jerusalem.
Abba Yahudah currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and divides his time between Jamaica and the Bay Area. His art has traveled internationally, to Italy, Spain, Ethiopia, exhibiting at the Habesha and Lela Art Galleries, and Jamaica, with an exhibit at the University of the West Indies. He has also exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and numerous galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has had an amazing and very successful show at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is also a talented musician and loving father. In 2014, Abba Yahudah published his first scholarly endeavor, A Journey To The Roots of Rastafari – The Essene Nazarite Link, written, compiled and illustrated by him.
Abba Yahudah Sellassie
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