Art Village now opens in Karen for young artists

Crazy idea

And so it was for Athaide who also had the ‘crazy idea’ several years back to build ‘Karen Village’, a 10-acre site committed to advancing creative expression among young Kenyan artists of all kinds. And just like Costner’s character, he built it and they did come last Saturday to its official opening by the Chief Justice of Kenya’s Supreme Court, Justice Willie Mutunga.

The Village isn’t fully built as yet, but that hasn’t stopped a whole range of Kenyan artists from moving in.

“We got our studio because we were among the first artists to take interest in Athaide’s [ambitious] plan,” said Esther Kahuti the ‘self-taught’ painter who’s also founder of Darubini Children’s Art School in Kiserian.

“We [meaning her and fellow painter Caroline Mbwiriri] have a studio because his policy was ‘first come first served’,” Esther added as she showed BDLife mixed media art by herself and some of her best students, Mukomo and F. Sande.

Artistic forms

So far, the Village has a lot of land but only six studios and a double-decker exhibition hall that is currently being occupied by the ‘keynote’ art exhibition of Professor Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui who’invited the Chief Justice and Justice Agnes Murgor to not only open the Karen Village officially but also open her retrospective exhibition which is serving as the main attraction at the Village currently.

Dr Mazrui’s exhibition exquisitely encompasses 37 years of her art and published writings, including her poetry, plays, scholarly texts and children’s books.

What was so revealing about her one-woman show was the rich array of artistic forms that she’s embraced in almost four decades of working, mainly as a fine art professor at Kenyatta University.

On display, she not only had her paintings, prints and spontaneous sketches that reveal her delicate ability to draw people, places and things in a flash.

She also showed the CJ and Justice Murgor lovely digital artworks that were so refined they could have easily passed for paintings and not digital works that she’d drawn on her computer first.

The two Justices also visited some of the studios, including one occupied by two glass artists, Tonney Mugo and Bernhard Viehweber whose glass windows grace churches, synagogues, hotels and office spaces both here and abroad.

Open air studios

The other studios are occupied by Anne Mwiti, Absalom Aswani, Kamunya Wanjuki and Beth Kimwere.

According the miniature 3D model of what Athaide envisages Karen Village to look like when it’s finally complete, there will be many more studios for mainly young visual artists and spaces for performing artists as well.

Many of those young artists were on hand last Saturday, some of whom found space under the many tents that Athaide set up; others simply put down blankets or mats to create temporary open-air studios to show off their work.

Karen Village doesn’t just welcome visual artists. A multitude of young musicians, comedians and actors are also there, some of whom performed on Saturday from noon into the night on the stage that has as its backdrop colourful graffiti by popular artists like Bankslave, Swift, Uhuru B and Smokey.

Opinions

Athaide says Karen Village will be more about providing space to young artists to work without interference than being strictly focused on performance. He told the CJ that he’d specifically solicited opinions of the artists themselves to ensure the Village served their needs, not his pre-conceived design.

Nonetheless, he told Sylvia Gichia, managing director of Kuona Trust that a lot of the Village’s design and goals were patterned along the lines of Kuona where the commitment to creativity and artistic expression (primarily) by Kenyans was an inspiration to him.

The other brand new art centre that opened last week was Wambui Kamiru’s fabulous Art Space which I will review shortly.

Finally, tonight, the 6th Kenya Arts Diary 2016 is being launched at the Heinrich Boell Foundation from 6pm.

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