Three paintings by Rosemary Karuga. She was one of the first students at the Makerere art school. PHOTO | ALAN DONOVAN 
On September 9, the Nairobi Gallery will host an exhibition celebrating nine of East Africa’s pioneering women artists.
The
exhibition, to run through December 5, will show how far the region’s
art and its purveyors have come. Kenyan Minister for Education, Amina
Mohamed will be the guest of honour.
East Africa is a
hotbed of creativity with almost every community proud of being the
makers of one form of art or another, and mostly for daily use too.
Art in Africa is not confined to artefacts and images to be hung on the wall. Art is everyday life images and objects.
1. MARGARET TROWELL
In
1934, Margaret Trowell arrived in Kenya with her husband and settled in
Machakos, 50km east of Nairobi. She was fascinated with the dexterity
and inherent artistic ability of the Kamba people among whom she lived
for several years; this led her to write her first book, African Arts and Crafts, a classic published in 1937.
Later,
she moved to Uganda, where she was the driving force behind the setting
up of the Art School at the fledgling Makerere University. Arguably,
the Art School became the best in Africa and now bears her name — the
Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA).
Her
philosophy was “art for art’s sake” and she believed that art should be
natural to the people. It was through her efforts that art was included
in the early curriculum of Kenyan schools.
However,
she clashed with Kenyan administrators of the time who basically wanted
to limit arts teaching to technical training in skills like carpentry,
which would be useful to the colonial government of the day. She found
the climate in Uganda more open and willing to promote art for art’s
sake.
She contracted one of the skilled Kamba carvers
she worked with to come to Uganda and teach one of the first courses in
African art and crafts.
She ended up publishing six books, including the groundbreaking African Design
in 1960, as well as organising numerous exhibitions by art students in
the region and in London, where she found support for her vision of the
arts.
2. ROSEMARY KARUGA
One
of the first beneficiaries of Makerere art school and its first woman
graduate was Rosemary Karuga, who had a Kenyan mother and Ugandan
father.
Karuga, now 90 years old, ailing and living
with her daughter in Ireland, developed a distinctive style of art using
collages of local materials as well as newspapers and magazines. She
became an art teacher and taught for many years.
She
has exhibited her works with the leading artists of the continent and
one of her early art students was the famous Kenyan ceramicist,
Magdalene Odundo.
3. MAGDALENE ODUNDO
Odundo
has received world acclaim for her extraordinary ceramic works. Her
“vessels” of clay, based on age old techniques from both East and West
Africa, reflect African culture. Her work is in a class of its own and
sells at phenomenal prices.
Odundo has recently taken
up glassmaking. This has resulted in several mammoth glass installations
both in the US and Europe, sponsored by leading names in the glass
industry like Corning.
Odundo had her first exhibition
in Africa at the African Heritage Gallery as part of the UN Decade of
Women's conference in 1985.
In 2008, she was granted the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for her service to the arts.
In
2012, she received the African Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award in
the Arts. Recently, she was installed as the chancellor of the
University of Creative Arts in the UK where she is Professor of
Ceramics, thus holding the highest international position in the arts of
any East African.
4. THERESA MUSOKE
Another graduate of Makerere University in later years was the Ugandan Theresa Musoke.
She
earned a Masters in Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania where
she developed her textile technique of painting and tie and dye. She
later took up residence in Kenya and lived in the country for 20 years
during which she exhibited regularly at local galleries.
She
held several exhibitions abroad, particularly in the Scandinavian
countries where her romanticised wildlife works, rendered in a moody
mixture of abstract batik and oil painting, won great acclaim.
She
taught art at Makerere University, then Kenyatta University College,
the International School of Kenya and several other institutions.
5&6. ROBIN ANDERSON and YONY WAIT-E
Two
of the pioneering nine women were co-founders of the then leading
contemporary art gallery in East Africa, the famous Gallery Watatu.
These
were Robin Anderson and Yony Wait-e (Jony Waite) who joined forces with
David Hart to found this historic art institution. Gallery Watatu has
since closed.
Anderson and Wait-e have very different
styles of art but it was through them that many artists had a platform
to show their works in an internationally recognised art space.
Anderson
is famous for her “silk batiks,” a unique combination of sketching,
painting and batik. Her subject matter is mainly people whom she
encountered while travelling in Kenya with her father, a medical doctor.
Wait-e’s
wildlife paintings are synonymous with Kenya’s safari style. They adorn
numerous public buildings and hotels, especially the Serena hotels and
lodges in Kenya and Uganda.
American-born Wait-e is
now a Kenyan citizen and founder of the Wildebeest Workshop in Lamu — on
Kenya’s North Coast — where she trains single women to produce high
quality wall hangings that sell on the world market.
7. JOY ADAMSON
In the 1950s, there emerged an extraordinary woman artist who was entirely self-trained.
Born Friederike Victoria "Joy" in what is now the Czech Republic, she was better known as Joy Adamson.
Although mostly remembered for her lion conservation work and her book Born Free, she was a naturalist, artist and author.
She
began painting trees and flowers of the then Kenya Colony, for which
she received an important international award. She also captured on
canvas the fish and coral reefs at the Kenya Coast as well as the
wildlife of the country.
She then turned her attention
to the ‘’Peoples of Kenya’’ — one of her books is titled thus. She knew
that the glorious adornment and costumes she saw during her travels
around the country would soon vanish, so she persuaded the colonial
authorities to support her new adventure, in the course of which she
painted the tribal costumes of the entire country of Kenya.
These masterpieces still adorn the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi as well as State.
Her
museum on the shores of Lake Naivasha showcases her earlier works on
Kenyan flora and fauna. However, she will always be most noted for the
story of Elsa the Lioness, as told in her many books and later a movie, Born Free, starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers in 1966.
8&9. GERALDINE ROBARTS and NANI CROZE
Representing
these nine courageous women, and expected to grace the opening of the
exhibition will be two artistic stalwarts — Geraldine Robarts and Nani
Croze.
Robarts has a lifetime of experience as a painter and university lecturer. She has lived in East Africa since 1964.
She has taught art at the Makerere and Kenyatta universities and has won numerous awards.
Through
various projects she has developed, Robarts has offered people the
opportunity to create income-generating activities that have improved
the lives of many people who otherwise were struggling to survive.
Last
but not least, Croze, who came to Kenya nearly a half century ago as an
elephant researcher, is not only an accomplished environmentalist but
is today synonymous with the Kitengela Glass Research and Training
Trust, which has brought another dimension to the arts of the region,
with stained glass windows and recycled glass objects.
Her
workshop just outside of Nairobi in the Athi plains, has turned an arid
landscape into a verdant fantasy land. Her monumental works appear in
public spaces like the courtyard of the National Museums of Kenya in
Nairobi, and her glass objects are a delight for those living in East
Africa and beyond.
In 2010, Croze founded the Kenya Arts Diary, an annual calendar and catalogue of Kenya artists.
One
thing in common these pioneering women of the arts have is that all
have been both artists and teachers — in universities, schools and
workshops.
As art historian Elsbeth Court remarked,
“They are all art teachers and art do-ers. Their sharing of art, their
experimentation, so much inclusion, outreach, generosity and institution
building, are noted as we celebrate their lifelong careers in art
making and active engagements to share art as a way of knowing, being,
and literally making a better world.”
No comments :
Post a Comment