Tabitha wa Thuku / Tabithawathuku

With Circle Art Gallery – I just got recognised as one of their top fans! 🎉

Art is life and treat for the soul

MEET THE ARTISTS IN INVOCATIONS | Theresa Musoke, (b. 1944)

Theresa Musoke is one of East Africa’s most prolific women artists. She is a painter, printmaker and sculptor most known for her rhythmic and expressionist painting style. Musoke was formally trained at the Makerere School of Fine Arts where her talents were recognised in the early 1960s. She became one of the first women students to graduate with a degree and was awarded the Margaret Trowell Painting Prize in 1965 for outstanding artistic achievement. This led to her first solo exhibition at Uganda Museum.

After graduation, Musoke pursued further studies in education and later taught for a year at Tororo girls’ school before receiving a Commonwealth scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London. The birth of her son in 1968 prompted her to return home and she returned to teaching, this time at Mount Saint Mary’s school.In 1969, she won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study for an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Art, where she focused on drawing, painting and graphics. In the early 1970s, she returned to Uganda and to Makerere University as a graphics lecturer.However, by then the political situation in the country under the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada was volatile, particularly for University faculty members, and she left Uganda in 1976 with her son to settle in Kenya.

Since returning to Uganda again in 1997, Musoke has continued her practice. Her work recently came back to the fore and public interest was renewed with the retrospective Theresa Musoke – Legendary Artist of Uganda at Nairobi Gallery in 2017. More recently her work was included in the exhibitions Paradise Edict, Michael Armitage at the Royal Academy, London and Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2021; Mwili, Akili Na Roho (Body, Mind, and Spirit): (NCAI) in 2022; and A Retrospective of Three Artists: Theresa Musoke, Tabiitha wa Thuku, Yony Waite at the Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi in 2022.

Biography courtesy of Letaru Dralega, as part of the AWARE Project: Tracing a Decade: Women Artists of the 1960's in Africa, in collaboration with Njabala Foundation.2023

My visual camera of accuracy 😂

I miss those. days

Kariuki and Kariuki

Go see Art NXT Level / Sergio Gomez talking about

Coming up in Kenya

Lot 20
Rosemary Karuga (Kenyan, 1928 – 2021)
Untitled (Three Birds), circa 1990s
Unsigned, undated, with a certificate of authenticity
Paper collage
41.2 x 28 cm

Provenance: private collection

Rosemary Karuga’s lifetime of remarkable achievements has placed her as a major figure in Kenya’s modern art history. In 1950 she became the first female student to attend the Margaret Trowell School of Fine and Applied Arts in Kampala, where she trained in clay work, wood carving and stone carving. Following her graduation, Karuga worked for many years as an art teacher in rural Kenya and it was only on her retirement, at nearly 60 years old, that she pursued a professional art practice.
Using mostly paper packaging, newspapers and magazines, Karuga developed an approach to collage which was unique at the time in East Africa, creating images which harness both extraordinary detail and charming simplicity.

Karuga’s international reputation grew when she exhibited in a group show alongside El Anatsui and Ablade Glover at the Studio Museum in New York in 1990. She was asked to illustrate a book by the Yoruba writer Amos Tutuola and the resulting exhibition took the artist and her collage works to Paris. As well as continuing to feature in international exhibitions, Karuga’s recognition increased at home as one of Gallery Watatu’s most highly esteemed artists, and in 2017 she was named Artist of the Month by the National Museums of Kenya. Karuga passed away last year in Ireland, where she had lived since 2006.


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Thanks to Almighty God every opportunity to share my Art . See you there ❤️

Pop-up exhibition | Ethos by Tabitha wa Thuku

Opening this weekend at the Harmony Center, a pop up exhibition by one of Circle’s artists with assistance from Circle Art Gallery, Naitiemu and Adam Masava.

If you are in Nairobi this weekend, go down and have a look.

To buy my

I was brought up here. My Dad was always making structures.
Coffee driers ,animals shelter ,our houses. My dad was an artist in his own right and he challenged and inspired me in a big way.
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Photo credit
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