KESHO KUTWA: CELEBRATING KENYA’S CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS & ART HISTORY

The Kesho Kutwa exhibition is the second in a series of exhibitions the National Museums of Kenya is hosting and curating, as a precursor to the launch of the National Art Gallery of Kenya (NAGOK) project.

September 11, 2021 - October 15, 2021

https://www.museums.or.ke/

Image courtesy of National Gallery of Kenya

This exhibition will provide a glimpse of what to expect once NAGOK is established and open to the public; - a combination of artworks from Kenya’s finest contemporary artists, in addition to historically significant pieces from NMK’s permanent collection.

The objective of the exhibition is two-fold. Firstly, Kesho Kutwa aims to chronologise the 50 plus year journey taken so far, towards the establishment of the National Art Gallery of Kenya. The journey has been long and difficult, fraught with all manner of challenges related to prioritisation and goodwill.

The manifold objectives of the NAGOK initiative are:

• To compile, curate and exhibit the history of Kenya’s visual arts.
• To create a professionally conceived, managed and maintained repository of, and home for Kenya’s visual arts.
• To bring relevant and powerful art to the Kenyan people.
• To create an accessible institution accommodating all Kenyans - artists, academics, students and observers.
• To provide the platform and resources to educate and ground our children with a clearer understanding of their national heritage.
• To provide a platform for cross-cultural visual arts education and exposure between Kenyans and other nationalities by way of exchange programmes of artwork.
• To accelerate the growth of the creatives industry in Kenya.

Kesho Kutwa – the day after tomorrow, heralds re-birth and renewal in a post-pandemic Kenya. The exhibition’s second objective is to bring together 5 accomplished Kenyan artists – Peter Ngugi, Beatrice Wanjiku, Michael Wafula, Peterson Kamwathi and Dennis Muraguri - that have created new works – paintings and woodcut prints that capture the endearing human spirit of re-birth and renewal. The exhibition explores life in a post-pandemic existence. The artists respond in their own unique predictive narratives to what the day after tomorrow will look like.

The exhibition will be held at the Nairobi National Museum’s Creativity Gallery .