In recent years, Kenya has emerged as a key hub for contemporary art in East Africa. Nairobi is becoming an ever-more important hub for art in the region with a growing list of contemporary art spaces. These include the prominent Circle Art Gallery as well as GoDown Arts Center, Kuona Artists Collective, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), and the One-Off Contemporary Art Gallery, to name a few.
Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage launched the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) in 2020. Image courtesy Artnet News.
Granted, the city has a smaller scene than other centres of contemporary art in Africa such as Lagos, Johannesburg and Cape Town, due to a number of significant setbacks such as insufficient galleries, schools and spaces to make and show art, as well as a lack of support from government. But though the Kenyan capital’s art market might be young, its artistic community is flourishing. After chronicling lists artists you should know in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and established artists in both South Africa and Nigeria we look east to Kenya.
The seven artists in this review do not form a comprehensive list by any means — it is a list of artists who are accessible and influential. Kenya is also home to renowned artists, Michael Soi, Boniface Maina, Michael Armitage and Wangari Mathangi among others.
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Ian Banja (b. Nairobi, 2000)
We’re starting this list with the youngest artist, Ian Banja. Born in Y2K and raised in Nairobi, the self taught artist who looks to the ordinary to find inspiration for his unusual paintings. In his case, the ordinary people aren't rich or famous but rather live at the whims of the contemporary world. Fitting neatly into the category of blackness in contemporary African art, Banja seems to be expressing an acute awareness, perhaps stemming from his Gen Z sensibility, of the world at large. His paintings allow another generation to re-imagine and re-present black experiences in ways that affords agency and power to the creator and their subject.
Ian Banja, Hand to Mouth (2021), Acrylic on canvas, Image courtesy Eclectica Contemporary.
It is as if the Banja is familiar with the host of characters he paints. Adorned in the apparel of Generation Z, youth culture — Nike, Louis Vuitton, Old Navy, Dior — the figures hold strong stances. The paintings are made in a way that is reminiscent of commercial photo studios that thrived in West Africa during the late 20th century — the aesthetics and imagery capture the energy and life of Banja’s young subjects.
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Thandiwe Muriu (b. Nairobi, 1990)
Thandiwe Muriu’s photography is characterised by an exuberant melee of sparkling colours, beautiful fabrics and raucous patterns — it is a maximalist feast for the eyes. The images feature models wearing garments of various traditional African textiles standing in front of backdrops to match creating a camouflage-like effect. Referencing the language of high-fashion photography, African studio photography and Pop Art, her work is both playful and imbued with meaning.
Thandiwe Muriu, Unity, 2022, Image courtesy 193 Gallery and the artist.
The clothing and backgrounds accompanied by black skin and architectural-Afro hairstyles speak to themes of black womanhood and convention beauty standards. The process of creating these works can be likened to a journey where the artist seeks her identity and cultural roots. Immediately recognisable, her psychedelic portraits with their punchy textiles and regal subjects draw the viewer in to interact with every pattern and adornment.
Muriu has won the People’s Choice Award for Emerging Photographer of the Year at Photo London 2020 and the Female In Focus Award by the British Journal of Photography 2021.
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Wangechi Mutu (b.Nairobi, 1972)
Critically acclaimed and well-established artist Wangechi Mutu presents a visceral and compelling conversation on dominant modes of representation. Working in multimedia and drawing from an array of sources such as natural materials, fashion magazines, medical diagrams, and traditional African arts, Mutu’s realms examine cultural identity, the feminine, colonial history, and global consumption. Her work is a fantastical journey and an odyssey of the unusual that the artist created by weaving together social reality and fiction.
Wangechi Mutu, ‘MamaRay’ (2020). Image courtesy Gladstone Gallery
The result is a practice populated by mythological creatures, cyborgs and hybrids that exist in a world between consciousness and dreamscapes, seemingly both real and unreal. Her hybrids and horrific and elegant all at once, they subvert the ways in which Black and female bodies have been depicted, packaged, and consumed. The figures simultaneously embody the disjointed experience of navigating transnational identity, contemporary Africa, and Western preconceptions.
Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem] Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum; and Tate Modern in London.
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Agnes Waruguru (b. Nairobi, 1994)
Agnes Waruguru has developed a varied oeuvre, encompassing painting, textile works, installation, and print in an effort to explore her own personal identity. Her works, across media, are often filled with washes of soft colour. Waruguru is intimately connected to her identity to the materials she uses — embroidery, fabrics, beads and needlework all address traditional notions of women’s work and traditional cultural identifiers.
Agnes Waruguru, ‘Nights in the Rain’, 2022, Acrylic paint, embroidery thread, fishing line and ink on cotton. Image courtesy the artist.
Last year, she opened her first solo exhibition, “Small Things to Consider,” at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi. Waruguru’s work was also exhibited at the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale, one of the most prestigious art events on the African continent, which opened in Cape Town in early 2020. She is currently in residency at the esteemed Rijksacademie in Amsterdam.
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Syowia Kyambi (b. Nairobi, 1979)
Syowia Kyambi is a contemporary award-winning Kenyan artist who uses multiple media, selecting which is most appropriate to express herself – ranging from sculpture and painting to video and sound to performance, Kyambi’s practice explores her home country, her past, her sexuality and the shifting world around her.
Syowia Kyambi, ‘Kaspale - The Vortex IV’ (2019) Image courtesy Artsy.
To arrive at this place, the artist is continually engaging and interrogating the colonial archive, in this case research is a strong element of her practice and the artist often references and utilises sociological, anthropological, psychological and cultural texts in her work. Working with the archive allows Kyambi to question perception and memory by examining the influence of constructed histories, cultural identities, past and present violence and colonialism.
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Magdalene Odundo (b. Nairobi, 1950)
Dame Magdalene Odundo DBE is arguably one of the most important contemporary artists to come out of Kenya. She creates understated, anthropomorphic ceramic vases laboriously produced via a method that involves gradually hollowing out a ball of clay and slowly pulling material upwards to form the pot. After the clay is shaped, the artist fires her objects multiple times, transforming her raw materials into voluptuous and shimmering red-orange and black sculptures. This method places Odundo within the tradition of pottery production in sub-Saharan Africa. In most of Africa pottery is made primarily by women, and Odundo recognises and reinforces this connection through her work’s references to the female body.
Magdalene Odundo, ‘Untitled’ (1989) Terracotta. Image courtesy Magdalene Odundo. Photo by Bill Dewey
Many public collections have acquired Odundo’s works, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the National Museum of African Art de la Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and the Nairobi National Museum. In 2020 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), for her contribution to art and arts education.
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Kawira Mwirichia (b.Nairobi, 1986 - 2020)
Kawira Mwirichia is well-known for her work as an artist and queer activist. Mwirichia’s work spanned a range of disciplines, including sculpture, drawing, painting and graphic design but her most famous work is To Revolutionary Type Love (later called Kanga Pride) which features a series of kangas — a colourful, printed cotton fabric often with a border along all four sides, a central part which differs in design from the borders and Swahili sayings. The artist's kangas celebrate and document the queer struggle and various turning points around the world and match the sayings to a country’s queer history.
Kawira Mwirichia,“Black and white are not the colors of love. They never were.”), 2017. Image courtesy Wetransfe
In 2015, a lesbian couple were refused service at a cafe in central Vienna after they shared a kiss. In protest, 2000 protesters staged a ‘kiss-in’ on the premises. So it follows that the saying on the Austrian kanga is, “Busu zako wangu, shairi kwa ngozi yangu” which translates to “Your kisses are poetry to my skin.” Referencing apartheid history, the saying on the South African kanga reads, “Haiwezekani, nyeupe na nyeusi pekee ziwe rangi za mapenzi” which translates into English as “Black and white are not the colours of love. They never were.” It’s emblazoned below a cameo of South African gay rights and anti-apartheid activist Simon Nkoli.