Indigo Arts Gallery | Art from Africa

Contemporary Kenyan art draws on a workshop movement analogous to the better known Centre d’Art in Haiti in the 1940’s, the Oshogbo workshops in newly independent Nigeria (from which Twins Seven-Seven and others emerged) and the Central African Workshop School in Southern Rhodesia, which gave rise to the Shona stone sculpture movement. The Paa-ya-Paa Art Center opened in Nairobi in 1965, two years after Kenyan independence. Other centers followed, such as the Kuona Trust Art Studio, Banana Hill Art Studio, Ngecha Artist Association and more recently the Godown Arts Center. Many of Kenya’s leading artists, such as Sane Wadu and Kivuthi Mbuno, worked at these centers and first exhibiteded commercially at the ground-breaking Gallery Watatu, founded in Nairobi in 1969.

"Sane" Mbugua Wadu was a primary school teacher who appeared at Gallery Watatu “wearing an improbable canvas suit he had painted himself and carrying shopping bags containing rolled up pictures” showing his wry view of Kenyan life. His friends called him insane, but when he had his first successful show at Watatu he responded by giving himself the nomme de guerre “Sane”. Kivuthi Mbuno was a game tracker from rural Makueni district who settled in Langata near old failed coffee farm Karen Blixen (Isak Dineson). He worked for the American photographer Peter Beard, among others and was clearly influenced by the drawings of Blixen’s old cook, Kamante Gatura. His surreal colored pencil drawings depict the rural tribal world of his childhood.

Kamau “Cartoon” Joseph was born in 1973 in Ngecha, outside of Nairobi. He first painted at the nearby Banana Hill Studio, and subsequently exhibited at Watatu and internationally. Historian Sidney Kasfir (in Contemporary African Art, 1999) describes him as an artist whose work “possesses an exuberance which is extremely difficult for formally trained artists to achieve.” James Mbuthia was born in Banana Hill in 1958 and taught himself to paint amid the “extraordinary concentration of artists” residing in that village. He has exhibited at both the art centers and established galleries, as well as in the US and abroad. John Kamicha grew up in the studio of his father, the painter Zachariah Mbuthia. But he swerved from that influence, layering his collage-like oils of village and wildlife on top of the ubiquitous, brightly patterned kanga cloths. Kevin Kariuki is a very creative sculptor who makes butterflies, beetles and other bugs from recycled tin cans and bottlecaps. Many artists from neighboring countries were also drawn to Nairobi, including the late artist George Thairu and the Sudanese-born artist Yassir Ali Mohammed, who works at the Kuona Trust Studio.