How local art institutes are filling gaps for government

From left: Art managers Muthoni Garland of StoryMoja, Ted Josiah of Sandstone Studios, Danda Jaroljmek of Circle Art Agency, Marion van Dijck, director of Sarakasi Trust, and Maggie Otieno of Arterial Network Kenya. Photo/MARGARETTA WA GACHERU 

By MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

In Summary

• Lack of government support for the arts and culture was identified as one of the key factors for Kenya not having the necessary facilities for training aspiring artists.

With art not being an examinable subject on the national schools’ curriculum, one might think there wouldn’t be many art managers in Nairobi.

But from the look of last Saturday’s ‘Catch-Up’ session organised by the Kenya Chapter of the Arterial Network, one could see there are quite a few, not only the four guest speakers panelists invited, but others who arrived at the Green House’s Creatives’ Garage.

Addressing a room-full of young ‘creatives’, including artists, art advocates, donors and art institutional managers who’d been attracted to attend the Saturday afternoon session, the four manager-panelists represented a variety of arts genres.

For instance, Muthoni Garland is the founder and managing director of Storymoja which is primarily concerned with book publishing and literature.

 

But this multifaceted woman is also a writer and actress who founded the Storymoja Hay Festival (which is coming up next month at Nairobi National Museum) which began six years ago as mainly a book fair, but since then has branched out into becoming a multifarious festival featuring such genres as poetry and the performing arts, music, dance and food, as well as panels and workshops conducted by both local and international writers.

Tedd Josiah is the founder and managing director of SandStone Studios. Best known as a music producer since 1995, his S3 Studios does more than just produce amazing new music. It’s also involved with video, film, animation and graphic design.

Danda Jaroljmek founded the Circle Art Agency (CAA) where she is also a co-director with Arvind Vohara and Fiona Fox. CAA is all about the visual arts, especially contemporary Kenyan and East African arts.

Having worked for years as the director of the Kuona Trust, which is a non-profit organisation, she started up CAA as a result of seeing Kenyan visual artists becoming increasingly productive and proficient, but needing broader audiences to ‘consume’ their art.

Finally, Marion van Dijck is a co-founder and director of Sarakasi Trust, which is primarily a performing arts centre concerned with the training and managing teams of Kenyan acrobats and dancers who perform both locally and internationally.

Based at the Sarakasi Dome, formerly the old Shan Cinema on Nairobi’s Ngara Road, Marion runs annual festivals and provides training to mainly young people from Nairobi’s estates and informal settlements.

Moderating the panel were Christine Gitau and Maggie Otieno, who are both Arterial Network members at the national and regional levels.

Skilfully balancing the managers’ brief explanations of what they do with a plethora of probing questions from the young creatives on hand, the two moderators were clearly committed to interactivity between the art managers and ‘the masses.’

The topics discussed included everything from how-to manage a local art institution to the pros and cons of lobbying to audience-building, the meaning of success and the role of the government in the promotion and appreciation of the arts and culture in Kenya.

Some of the key problems facing young artists in Kenya today were also identified. They include the unfortunate lack of an Art School which could be training young people in all the various cultural genres.

It’s a task currently being addressed only partially by various art institutions, such as S3 Studios (on a one-on-one basis), Sarakasi Trust (as a rule), The Theatre Company (regularly) and Kuona Trust (through a wide array of short workshops and art residencies).