Untitled III (Kenyan Birds) 2000

Rosemary Karuga fashioned this untitled collage of Kenyan birds out of paper. She was part of a generation of African artists who navigated the complexities of post-colonial identity through art. Karuga received formal training at Makerere University in Uganda, an institution modeled on British art schools. However, she rejected Western painting styles in favor of local subject matter. During the 1960s, Karuga taught art to primary school children. The visual language and the found materials she favored in her personal artwork may reflect the influence of that work. By using scraps of paper from newspapers and magazines, Karuga challenged elitist notions of what art should be made of. The collage may also refer to Kenya’s rapidly changing cultural landscape. For example, the source texts seem to be of European origin, gesturing towards Kenya’s relationship to the wider world. To understand Karuga’s place in Kenyan art history, we can delve deeper into archives, exhibition catalogs, and oral histories from the period. Art is always contingent on its social context.