JUNK ART: the genre of choice for many Kenyan artists

JUNK ART: the genre of choice for many Kenyan artists

By Margarettawa Gacheru

Posted September 2, 2012

Sunday Nation, Nairobi

Scrap metal used to be among the cheapest medium that struggling East African artists used to scavenge from junk yards to create what was eventually christened ‘junk art’.

Among the first junk artists to create sculptures using scrap metal were Ugandan artists, Francis Nnaggenda and John Odoch Ameny.

Odoch popularized junk art in Nairobi when he migrated to Kenya during the era of Idi Amin and exhibited life-sized scrap metal caricatures of Amin at African Heritage Pan African Gallery.

Scrap metal was still plentiful at the time. So it was no surprise that junk art became a fully-fledged genre from those ‘early days’.

Starting in the 1980s with Kioko Mwitiki (whose life-sized scrap metal wildebeests, elephants and hippos are today on permanent display at San Diego Zoo in USA), junk art has taken on a life of its own. A wide range of Kenyan junk art practitioners now exist, including Joseph Bertiers Mbatia, Harrison Mburu, Dennis Muraguri, Cyrus Nga’nga,  Ken Mwingi and Alex Wainaina whose solo exhibition of Junk Art is currently running at Le Rustique in Westlands.

In part, the popularity of junk art is because the medium has been relatively cheap and readily accessible until quite recently.

The other reason for the growth of the [junk art] genre is because master junk artists like Kioko and Odoch took on apprentices and taught them the technique and business of doing junk art.

But times have gotten tough for many junk artists, according to Kioko, Wainaina and others. The problem is the disappearance of scrap metal.

“Scrap metal has become scarce ever since the Chinese came to Kenya and began collecting and exporting it back to China,” Kioko said.

So dire was the situation that junk artists actually called upon the Kenya Government to restrict the export of scrap metal, which it did for a time. But the scrap still disappears and few culprits are caught.

Nonetheless, junk artists like Ken Mwingi have chosen to stick with the genre but branch out into other types of junk besides scrap metal. Mwingi now incorporates everything from computer monitors and bicycle spares which he generates himself.

Dennis Muraguri mixes scrap metal with textiles, broken clocks and other paraphernalia to create mask-like junk art. He has also shifted from sculpture to printmaking as one more artistic survival strategy.

Meanwhile, Cyrus Nga’nga solves the problem of shortages by sticking with beer and soda bottle tops that he hammers and stitches into everything from crocodiles to peacocks.

But Alex Wainaina has chosen to take a different tack altogether. Instead of scouring the once richly endowed scrap metal sites, the former mechanical engineer simply goes to the scrap metal ‘capital’ of Nairobi, Gikomba, and buys used oil drums.

The drums are not cheap and they are also in much demand. Wainaina explains that it’s not only the Chinese scrap metal scavengers that junk artists are in competition with today. It is also his fellow Kenyans who use the sturdy drum walls as building materials.

But Wainaina is willing to pay the price for the oil drums since junk art has been his source of livelihood for the last few years. In fact, ever since he got the contract from Village Market sometime back to scatter his scrap metal mannequins all over the up-scale shopping mall, his junk art sells itself.

Currently exhibiting both inside and out at Le Rustique restaurant through the first week of September, Wainaina’s junk art has previously been on display everywhere from Gallery Watatu and Banana Hill Art Gallery to the Nairobi National Museum.

Caroline Odongo directs 2 Aychbourn Plays

Seeing Life through Another’s Eyes

By margaretta wa gacheru

Posted September 1, 2012

Saturday Nation, Nairobi

Aspiring Kenyan playwrights might learn a thing or two from the Anglo scribe Alan Ayckbourn, who, as from next Friday night, will have two different scripts being staged simultaneously in Nairobi, one with Phoenix Players, the other by a new group calling itself Working Title Theatre Production, and both directed by Carol Odongo.

If I were you, which just opened last Friday night at Professional Centre, offers an excellent illustration of what’s best about Ayckbourn (who’s written more than 75 plays, nearly half of which have won accolades) and why his work has qualities and characteristics worth emulating, at least as far as form is concerned. (Content is another matter altogether) 

The first is character development. Ayckbourn takes his time to allow audiences to learn a good deal about the people that populate his plays. For instance, in the first act of If I were you, we meet the whole Rodale family and quickly learn they all live in one brand of hell or other. The biggest bugger of the lot is the unfaithful Baba Rodale, Mal (Kenga Sankei) while the sweetest, most long-suffering is his wife Jill (Esther Neema). Their kids Sam (Isaac Kimiyu) a student and Christie (Jackline Njoroge), a young mother and apple of her father’s eye, are witnesses to their parents’ misery, feeling the effects themselves.

Act 1 is largely spent showing us this sad situation. Unfortunately, it’s revealing and rugged, but it was slow-going between scenes. At intermission, I was tempted to leave; but as I knew Ayckbourn is renowned for rapid turn-arounds and surprising twists, I stayed. And I am glad I did.

Act 2 finally brought us what we’d been promised beforehand - a clever comedy which initially might have seemed far-fetched, but so what! After a day of dreary familial pain, Mal and Jill take a rest, only to wake up having somehow switched bodies so that the mean-spirited Mal is trapped inside Jill’s body and the sweet, long-suffering mama is stuck inside the lanky form of her mate.

The actors do a delightful job taking on the body language of their spouse. Yet once they choose to spend the day in the other’s respect work sites (Mal being Jill staying home, Jill being Mal, the sales manager at a bed and bedding store), the serious fun begins.

It isn’t just that each discovers how they are perceived by others, which is an ugly eye-opener for Mal, who’s seen as a philandering bastard by his kids. It is the discovery of secrets that the other’s been keeping: Jill getting confirmation of Mal’s mistress and Mal learning of Jill’s plan to leave him for good.

Both parents also learn their beloved Christie is being physically abused by their son-in-law Dean (Kevin Nzevela), which leads to the high point of hilarity in the show, when Dad (inside the visage of Jill) clobbers Dean for mistreating his daughter.

Mom (inside Mal) also makes unexpected decisions at work. She/He sweet-talks all of Mal’s disgruntled clients and shows compassion to all his staff. He/She even takes them all out for a drink at the company’s expense, to Mal’s chagrin.

Both actors do a dazzling job ‘becoming’ their spouse. But the other high-point of irony comes when Mal (inside Jill) is forced to face his son’s affinity for theatre. The dad had once had high expectations of Sam becoming a top sportsman or professional, but Sam’s only interest is Shakespeare. Rehearsing his lines with ‘Mom’, Sam performs a soulful rendition of Francis Flute dying from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. The dad finally sees his son through new eyes.

The role reversal only lasts a day. And as the show ends, we are left wondering what happens next. But again, this is classic Ayckbourn: leave the audience wondering, aware that we may have just witnessed a life-transforming event for all the Rodales, or maybe not.

Ayckbourn’s other script, How the other half loves has some similarities to If I were you, especially his inclination to examine daily life from various perspectives. In this case, the contrast is class-based. The script revolves around three couples (one lower, one middle and one upper class) meeting for a meal (or rather meals). The mix is messy but the humor’s not to be missed. Running this weekend only at AF, it’s the show to see.

Willie Wambugu: 'the Artistic Anthropology of Shoes'

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The Artistic Anthropology of African Shoes

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

April 2012 
Written b4 his exhibition in Brussels in August 2012

Willie Wambugu had been drawing with biros pens for as long as he can recall. But when the self-taught artist decided to take his art seriously, he thought he had to shift from pencils and pens to oil paints.

It was the Italian-born curator Samantha Ripa di Meana who convinced the young Kenyan to get back to what he does well and forget about the oils.

The consequence of her conviction was a recent exhibition of Wambugu’s drawings at Ripa di Meana’s home just off Lower Kabete Road.

Showcasing his work in her garage-turned-gallery, Ripa di Meana has only known Wambugu for a year. They met at Kuona Trust where she was giving a talk on Russian and Chinese contemporary art.

Yet in that short time, she’s not only encouraged Wambugu to stay focused on what he does best, namely meticulous drawing, not oil painting which he’d been dabbling in since he graduated from Kenya Polytechnic in communications technology.

She also encouraged him not to simply see art as a means of making fast cash by focusing solely on the tourist and expatriate art market.

“William has real talent, but if he simply paints to meet what he thinks is the current market in tourist art, he will waste his gifts,” she said, noting that his drawing are met painstakingly deliberate, detailed and delicate.

Describing Wambugu’s approach to his art as “anthropological”, Ripa di Meana has so far helped Wambugu mount two solo exhibitions. The first was late last year which she helped organize one at the Belgian Embassy. In black and white, all his drawings were singularly about locally-used hand tools, including wheelbarrow and rakes, machetes and njembes, in other words, artifacts from everyday Kenyan life. The artist sold almost all his work, just as the curator foresaw.

Wambugu’s recent Westlands show was all about locally-worn shoes.

 “Shoes say a great deal about people, especially their social status and class,” said Wambugu while standing at the entrance of the gallery/garage, presiding over two walls worth of detailed drawings of all sorts of Kenyan shoes, from sneakers, sandels, and gum boots to Nike sports shoes, putiputi, hush puppies and dress shoes made of leather-like plastic.

For Wambugu, shoes also say something about Kenya’s colonial past and the fact that shoes were rarely worn before the colonizer imported them and made them an insignia of the so-called ‘civilized’ African.

Another signifier of the colonial mission to ‘civilize the natives,’ says Wambugu was the school uniform, elements of which he drew and hung on the third garage-gallery wall. Having grown up in Nairobi and gone to schools that compelled him to wear uniforms, he’d carefully drawn everything from the socks, shorts and tie to the school brazer, dust jacket and even the school apron he wore in pre-primary. All had been mandatory, reinforcing a regime that fostered conformity, uniformity and assumed civility.

“What I appreciate about William is the way he takes a topic and interrogates it in detail. In this case, the topic is colonialism symbolized in the shape of shoes,” said Ripa di Meana who will showcase Wambugu’s art in June in her gallery in Belgium, called Roots Contemporary.

She’s already exhibited several of his drawings early this year along with works by other Kenya artists, such as Ato Malinda, James Muriuki, and Paul Onditi.

But the June exhibition will be devoted exclusively to Wambugu’s work, including not just his shoes, tools and school uniforms, but also interiors made out of cardboard which were the first clear signs the curator saw that Wambugu not only had persistence, but originality and courage to work with new media such as shipping boxes, the only materials she initially shared with him.

Subsequently, she has given him art paper from France, India and China on which to draw. She also inspired him to draw not just Kenyan shoes, but also Chinese pairs which she had collected during her years living in that region. Ripa di Meana agreed to share her shoe collection with him, “seeing that colonialism has been followed by globalization, symbolized by Chinese shoes,” she said.

What’s most fascinating about Wambugu’s shoes is that while they might seem like the most mundane of subjects to draw, still when seen in the light of an anthropological approach to indigenous culture, shoes can be speak volumes about the way Kenyans are living today.

Wambugu’s exhibition in Brussels at Roots Contemporary Gallery opens June 14^th and runs the whole month.

Currently, nine pieces of of Wambugu’s inventive cardboard creations are on display at Le Rustique restaurant in Westland for the month of April.

Graffiti Artist par excellence: Swift Elegwa

GRAFFITI ARTIST PAR EXCELLENCE: SWIFT ELEGWA

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Posted at Africa Review

August 28, 2012

Long before graffiti art made a big splash in Nairobi's city center when anonymous artists worked clandestinely to create powerful political statements attacking corrupt Members of Parliament, Swift Elegwa was beautifying Nairobi estates with his own brand of graffiti art.

Making his graffiti art 'debut' in 2002 in Jericho where he had seen there  were countless blank walls that he felt were just waiting to be touched by spray paint and his original graffiti designs, Swift has since extended his open air Eastlands 'art gallery' to include a slew of 'slum' suburbs.

Often working together with other graffiti artists including novices who he instructs, Swift has covered walls everywhere from Kayole, Kibera and Kawangware to Kariobangi and Mathare.

But he has also been prolific in Upper Hill where he first met a slew of young graffiti artists through WAPI, the British Council's initiative to give wall space and regular Saturdays for several years to so-called 'underground artists' to create their graffiti art.

From 2003 to 2006, Swift went every month to spray paint and meet up with artists known only as Bank Slave, Smokey and Uhuru with whom he has often worked  on communal art projects ever since.

One such project was a set of graffiti murals commissioned by the GoDown, which is how the graffiti portraits of everyone from Miriam Makeba and Michael Jackson to Barack Obama went up on GoDown walls.

In fact, Swift had been painting portraits of 'prominent' people long before he arrived to work at the GoDown. His mentors in portraiture had been the master matatu artists with whom he had worked when he was still a novice in the field, apprenticing at the Double M bus workshop on Outer Ring Road.

"Only the most skillful matatu artists did the portraits, which is what i had hoped to become, but then when the government banned matatu art, I had to decide what to do next. That was when i began seriously spray-painting on walls," Swift said, just shortly before he was heading off to Sweden to attend an international graffiti art conference.

In fact, Swift had already begun painting portraits of rap musicians on T-shirts, which is how he got his first '15 minutes of fame.'

"The rappers would appear in music videos wearing my T-shirts, and suddenly, everyone wanted a T-shirt like theirs," he recalled.

Not long after that, he got called by Nation TV to appear on their program, 'Art Beat'. Since then, he has been doing graffiti art for everything from product promotions to private home beautification.

But even as Swift has successfully commercialized his skills as a graffiti artist, his first calling is still to fill all the empty wall space he can find with enlightening graffiti art irrespective of the price tag his work might fetch.

That sense of calling is what compelled Swift to ask Elimo and Phillda Njau of Paa ya Paa Art Center if he could cover their blank mabati (corrugated iron) walls with graffiti art. He had visited PYP for the first time in 2011 and instantly felt an affinity for the art center..

The Njaus agreed and soon after that, Swift was spray painting bright elegant images all the way down Paa ya Paa Lane, almost to the main Ridgeway Road leading to the Windsor Hotel.

"I did it for free," said Swift when asked how much he'd charged. It was his gift to a place he felt represented the beauty his mabati wall also reflects.

Today, Swift divides his time between portrait painting (still on T-shirts) and wall art. He particularly loves working with fellow graffiti artists on projects, such as the two he organized with assistance from the Kenya Community Development Project and the Changamoto fund. The funding enabled him to go to Eastlands estates with fellow artists and start training promising young spray painters in the skills of creating graffiti art. The funding for those projects wasn’t nearly enough for Swift to get around to all the ‘slum’ estates as he had wished, especially as cans of spray paint are not cheap, and if one wants to also use air brushes (which Swift is especially fond of) those can be quite costly.

Nonetheless, once the funding was finished, Swift and his crew didn’t stop heading regularly to the ‘slums’ to scout out the diminishing numbers of blank walls. The impulse to create graffiti statements is something Swift now has in his blood!

He’s not yet 30 years old, but Swift can still be called a pioneer in graffiti art, a master of one art form that makes a lot of sense to a multitude of young Kenyans, especially those who admire and hope for the return of matatu art.