Rosemary Namuli Karuga

She’s a lesser known artist compared to her fellow contemporary Kenyan female artists like Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo but equally accomplished and possesses international acclaim. Once described as “a Master Collage Artist” by Red Hill Gallery and “a Kenyan Treasure” elsewhere, Karuga was an artist whose art career did not follow the typical timeline of an East African artist.

Born in 1928 in Meru, Karuga is thought to have pioneered the art of Collage in East Africa. Curiously, ever since Karuga laid her artistic hands on charcoal in childhood, the walls of her home were constantly under the duress of her penchant for visual expression. Seemingly unappreciative of her budding artistic skills, her parents would often criticise her for dirtying the walls. But hardly would she stop. Noticing her talent, an Irish Catholic nun at a school Karuga attended would recommend her to Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art for further training in 1950.

And by that, at 21 years old, Karuga became the first woman to join and graduate from the prestigious art school in its early years. For her two-year period at the school, Karuga studied painting, design and sculpture. The latter discipline being taught to her by fellow compatriot Gregory Maloba, the accomplished sculptor and professor with tremendous influence on Uganda’s contemporary art.

Karuga would find love in her final year of study, get married, graduate the same year (1952) and return to her homeland in Kenya. In Kenya, hardly would she make headway in sculpting – a discipline painstakingly studied in art school – particularly working with clay. Reason? No money to purchase art materials, little earnings from her sculptures, and zero access to art institutions.

“I could not get fire for my clay. I tried even to work with Plaster of Paris but it was not successful. I just left it like that and I gave up…” Karuga told ArtHouse.

Karuga became employed as a teacher at local primary school near her home until her retirement in 1987. And as a teacher, Karuga’s art practice would stall for about 30 years after her graduation. So, what might have been an immediate start to her art career turned out to be a three-decade wait.

Almost nearing retirement after approximately 33 years in civil service, Karuga began splicing coloured paper scraps from packaging materials, glossy magazines and newspaper into collage. Waste Rexona soap and unga flour wrappings were some of her initial artmaking materials. Consequently, she would request her students to bring with them any such waste paper wrappings especially the colored type. And she stashed most of her earlier collages in her house.

So the underpinnings of prohibitively expensive commercial art materials even when she was ready to get back into artmaking inspired her pivot into Collage art.

After her retirement in 1987, it would take some convincing from one of her daughters who was visiting from London in the late 1980s for Karuga to return to commercial art production. And it’s against this backdrop that her daughter presented at a Nairobi gallery with collages Karuga had kept hidden in her house. This was at the beginning of her sixth decade of life.

Taking a four-month artist’s residency at Paa ya Paa Gallery – an art centre run by her former Makerere classmate and artist Elimo Njau, Karuga’s re-entry into the commercial art production was off to a great start. Not initially her area of specialization (sculpture was), her Collages held up well. Interviewing for ArtHouse in 1995, interviewer Jacky Chambers acknowledged the duality of display evident on Karuga’s work:

“I have seen some of her work and loved the way it was two different things at the same time. Closeup, they are simple pieces of paper stuck on a page. Stand back and something more detailed and complex comes into focus – more like a painting…”

Typical Makerere graduates’ artworks beckoned the viewer with nature’s majesty, and works by Karuga transports them to rural life in Meru, her place of birth. A two-roomed house in the outskirts of Nairobi city is where Karuga lived with her daughter when she got back into art – and it’s from where she visited Nairobi in search of colored news papers especially German and French newpapers for her art.

In his book Thelathini: 30 Faces, 30 Facets of Contemporary Art in Kenya, the writer, artist and curator Mbuthia describes Karuga’s style as follows:

“I will never forget Karuga’s description of how a lion comes alive in her collages. First she makes a forest from the colours that she has cut up for that day. Then, from among the trees and the thicket, a lion slowly emerges and she follows it with glue and cut-up paper until it is as real a lion as one would encounter in a photograph or a movie. Suddenly the viewer begins to see layers of content upon a rainbow of colours with inlaid text in varying fonts and hues…Imagining all this, the viewer can almost hear the chirping of the birds on the thorn tree.”

Despite taking on her art career professionally in her sixties, a stage where dwindling eyesight and hearing had begun taking a heavy toll on her productivity and quality of life, she went on to produce iconic works. Karuga’s collages first emerged in public at Gallery Watatu in the late 80s. They would garner international interest after the Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola commissioned Karuga to illustrate an edition of his book, The Palm Wine Drinkard in 1990.

And for her work’s inaugural appearance at the international stage, Karuga’s alluring collages formed part of a group exhibition titled Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition organised by Studio Museum in Harlem, New York in 1992. In the group show, she exhibited alongside El Anatsui and Ablade Glover. To that end, she would earn the Lifetime Achievement Award from the African Voice newspaper, in 2006 – an award bestowed to Africans in honour of their contributions in Irish society.

Consequently, she would become the first East African woman to be awarded the prestigious accolade. Her paintings grace today’s art centres in Kenya including Red Hill Art Gallery, Watatu Foundation and African Heritage Museum.