Women artists of our time in one show

Anyone claiming there have been no great women artists in Kenya needs to think again or head straight over to Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi where three women are having a retrospective show running through February 26.

Yony Waite, Theresa Musoke, and Tabitha wa Thuku all had work prepared in their studios that could have filled the gallery three times over, admits Circle gallery’s founder Danda Jaroljmek.

“But as we can only do six or seven exhibitions a year, given we also attend three or four [international] art fairs, and hold the [East African] art auction annually, we had to have them altogether,” she says.

“We also wanted this show to bridge a gap between [senior] artists and the younger generation who may not know these women’s art,” she adds.

While they each represent different generations, have different painterly styles, and have made different contributions to the Kenyan art scene, all three are brilliant artists.

“All three are also quirky, yet adorable,” Danda adds.

What they equally share is professionalism that represents a radical departure from what has stereotypically been deemed ‘airport or souvenir art’.

For while they all share a love of nature, their portrayals of landscape and wildlife are inspired, original, and often semi-abstract. “We’ve never exhibited wildlife or landscape in the gallery before,” Danda states emphatically.

“That’s because those are archetypical images of souvenir art,” she adds, the implication being that their ostriches, giraffes, and wildebeests are anything but touristic.

And they are not.

What hits you as soon as you enter the gallery is that the first wall contains one work by each artist, suggesting the whole show is likely to reflect this kind of equity among the three.

Yet the fascination of the exhibition for me will be identifying which painting is by which artist because their styles are unique and distinct. Yet the beauty of the way Danda and her gallery manager Don Handa have thoughtfully hung this large exhibition is that the paintings harmonise with one another so well.

One distinctive feature of Theresa’s art is her draftsmanship, her use of fine lines to draw her creatures even as they might morph from being giraffes or gerenuks into becoming untitled unidentifiable animal beings.

She, like Yony, delights in painting wildebeests, giraffes, and other creatures, only that Yony’s creatures are more contextualised within her landscapes. It is almost as if they are in hiding from the artist who intentionally paints them being in harmony with the savannah/bush.

The one painting of Yony’s that I was most drawn to was ‘High Noon’. Here her bushes are diamond-shaped, reflecting parched earth, with two stately giraffes in the background looking on, just as we are.

Yet Yony’s style cannot be classified. The woman herself cannot be confined, and this show, despite its numerical limitations, allows us to get a taste of her rich diversity of interests. She paints everything from gnus to pythons to naked bathers on a four-paneled screen.

Painting primarily in black and white, perhaps this is also her way of rebelling against the other stereotype about African art which is that it’s always bright and colourful.

In contrast, any other hues that she uses, be they gold or ochre, are muted and used to illuminate what is going on elsewhere in her painting. Meanwhile, Tabitha’s paintings are easily distinguished as they are all dream-like and heavily layered in colours that tend to be dark and reveal light only occasionally as with ‘Far far away” which is barely suggests the coming dawn.

Otherwise, when she does allow brighter colours to find their way into her work, she wins with paintings like ‘Small Winds’, ‘The Ground is Smiling’ and ‘A Universe in a Village’.

One may ask why classify all three as Kenyan, when Theresa is a Ugandan and Yony is originally from the US. But Musoke spent many years working, painting, and holding exhibitions in Nairobi.

She also taught at Kenyatta and Makerere universities as well as the International School of Kenya. So while she is technically an East African, her contribution to this country has touched the lives of many right here.

And Yony carries a Kenyan passport, having chosen to illustrate her opposition to the Iraq war by giving up one passport for another. What’s more, Yony co-founded Gallery Watatu, with the late Robin Anderson and David Hart.

In its heyday, Watatu was the place to exhibit your art, thanks to Yony.