January 16-19, 2020 Metropolitan Pavilion 125 W. 18th Street New York, NY 10011 Morris Ben Newman was one of the most enigmatic figures in visionary art.His paintings are mostly landscapes that are somehow familiar, yet exotic and other wordly. A resident of Cleveland, Ohio, Newman listed Ethiopia as his place of birth, claiming royal ancestry linked to the Falasha Jews (black descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel). He counted among his ancestors King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. His paintings reflect that Ethiopian ancestry in that they often include what he referred to as “New Flowers” which in the Ethiopian language translates as Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Newman often told stories of his travels in Europe and the U.S., and described numerous trips to Haiti where he taught in a school for zombies. He believed he possessed psychic powers, and claimed to have engaged in astral travel. Newman was a large stately man of imposing proportions, whose extraordinary and exaggerated claims defined his persona.Those who knew him say that he had such a powerful presence that you wanted to believe his stories… including his assertion that he had been reincarnated 33,906 times.