SHAKE MAKELELE SHARES VILLAGE MARKET SHOW WITH UGANDAN ARTISTS

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Top East African artists exhibit at Village Market

Ssekubulwa’s Gorilla painting. Photo/Courtesy 

In Summary

• The first Gifted Hands show was held last year around the same time at the Village Market. It was successful enough for Kalule and Makelele to return to the same venue, this time with several more artists.

By Margaretta wa Gacheru 

margacheru@gmail.com

Louis Mwaniki was among Kenya’s first globe-trotting visual artists. But among the so-called ‘second generation’ of Kenyan artists, Shake Makelele was among the first to rove around the East African countryside while still a student at the Creative Arts Centre in Nairobi in the early 1990s.

“There were quite a few of us Kenyans who attended the Pan-African Commonwealth Conference in 1994,” said Makelele referring to the historic Kampala conference where he and other Kenyans such as Shine Tani and Mazola all exhibited at what was then known as the Nile Conference Centre.
 “We met so many amazing people that time, including the wife of Malcolm X [Betty Shabazz] and Ngugi wa Thiong’o who gave Kenyan artists an inspiring talk about how Africans needed to work together for our fellow Africans and not simply cater to foreign audiences.”

That trip marked a new beginning for a number of Kenyans including Shine who came back to Kenya and registered the Banana Hill Art Studio. It also launched a lifelong career for Shake trekking across borders and whole continents to exhibit his art everywhere from Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Johannesburg to London, Edinburgh and even the Isle of Skye.

Ruth Schaffner

Not that he’s ignored the Kenya arts scene altogether. He noted, “I frequently attended the National Museum’s annual Kenyan Art Festival,” which is currently being revived by the Kenya Museum Society, renamed the Kenyan Art Fair and scheduled to take place in early October.

He also exhibited often at Gallery Watatu while Ruth Schaffner was alive.

But one was far more likely to find Makelele showing his art in Uganda than Kenya, first at the Afri-Art Gallery where he met Herbert who was then managing the gallery. Then when Kalule opened up his own Umoja Gallery with Ugandan businessman Hillary Lyton in 2010, Makelele became a regular exhibitor there.

“There are a lot of galleries in Kampala currently and many, including ours, is doing quite well,” says Kalule who, with Makelele and a dozen more Ugandan artists, currently have a group exhibition at the Village Market entitled ‘Gifted Hands II’.

Annual event

The first Gifted Hands show was held last year around the same time at the Village Market. It was successful enough for Kalule and Makelele to return to the same venue, this time with several more artists.

“We hope to make it an annual event,” says Kalule who, in addition to curating this show, is exhibiting his own art—paintings and colourful batik-styled textiles (which are elegant and affordable at KSh3,000 per four metre piece).

Makelele is actually the linchpin of the whole show since he is the only Kenyan exhibiting among the dozen Ugandans, half of whom are university graduates in fine art, half self-taught as is the case with Kalule who says he grew up in a household full of artists.

Other self-taught Ugandan artists whose work is in the show are Edison Lugala, Ssali Yusef, Anwar Sadat; Paul Kintu and Kalule himself.

The art school-trained artists in the show include David Kigozi, Jjuko Hoods and several Makerere University graduates, including Paul Kibuka, Steve Ipoot, Ronex Aebicinbwe, Ssebudake, Sekubulwa and Makalele as well.

Self-taught

The mix between schooled and self-taught artists is revealing since the trained artists are proficient in both drawing and painting, but so are the self-taught lot, with one caveat. The latter group seem to be more experimental and daring.

For instance, Sadat’s Elephants look surreal,; Lugala tries out a wide range of topics and techniques in his art, and even Ssali Yusef, who’s best known for painting beautiful African women, made a major shift into colourful patchwork-styled semi-abstract art .

Meanwhile, downstairs at Village Market, Patricia Njeri is exhibiting her recycled art, made out of wine and spirits bottles which she covers in either brightly painted decorative designs or kitenge scraps or even coloured glossy paper from foreign magazines.

She’s another self-taught artist who’s also experimental and daring, having collected bottles over time and just a few months ago decided they’d be a good medium on which to create works of art. Her bottles cost from Sh2,000 to Sh3,000.

Most of the art pieces at this exhibition cost from Sh8,000 up to Sh65,000.

This article was first published on the Business Daily website