Rosemary Karuga

Biography

A Rexona soap wrapper, a bag that once held Unga flour, pages from glossy magazines: this is what Rosemary Karuga made her pictures from when ordinary paints became unaffordable. When brushes were scarce, she made her own from feathers.

She was born on 19 June 1928 in Meru, Kenya, to a Ugandan father and a Kenyan mother, the youngest of two daughters. Her father worked as a driver and believed in the value of education. As a child she drew in charcoal on the walls of the house, which did not please her parents. St. Theresa Primary School in Eastleigh, Nairobi, was run by Irish nuns, who noticed her talent and urged her to study further. She did well in geography and nature studies, and after school she trained as a teacher.

In 1950, at twenty-one, she went to Kampala, to the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University. Until 1952 she studied design, painting and sculpture, specialising in sculpture; among her tutors was Gregory Maloba. She was the first woman to graduate from the university. She worked briefly in commercial art and returned to Kenya. After that, her art went into the background for more than thirty years. She taught art, married in 1953, and she and her husband had three children. Besides teaching, she was a subsistence farmer. In 1965 she took part in an artists’ workshop organised by Elimo Njau at his Kibo Art Gallery in Marangu, Tanzania, but with such a workload she could not pursue her art seriously. Among her pupils was the future ceramicist Magdalene Odundo, now one of the best-known Kenyan British ceramic artists.

In the 1980s, when she was nearly sixty, she left teaching. One of her daughters, who had come to visit from London, encouraged her. The oils, pastels and watercolours she had been trained to use at university were now out of reach, so she turned to paper. From scraps of packaging, newspapers in European languages and magazines she made collages built, like Byzantine mosaics, from small pieces of coloured fragments. She took her subjects from village life: pastoral and domestic scenes, villagers, animals.

In 1987 she became an artist in residence at the Paa ya Paa Arts Centre in Nairobi.

In 1988 the French directors Gilles Zaepffel and Paule Kingleur commissioned her to illustrate a stage adaptation of Amos Tutuola’s novel “The Palm-Wine Drinkard”. The shows were staged in Limoges in 1988 and in Épinal in 1989. The result was 24 large-format works, and after 1990, it seems, they were not shown together again. The commission drew attention to her, and in the 1990s her collages were exhibited in Paris, at the Commonwealth Institute in London and at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In Paris, by her own account, she was impressed by the respect shown there to artists. In the exhibition “Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition” (Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) she was the only woman. Shown alongside her were El Anatsui, Bruce Onobrakpeya and others. The newspaper African Voice gave her a lifetime achievement award. Karuga’s work is in the collections of the National Museums of Kenya, the Murumbi Trust, the Watatu Foundation and the Red Hill Gallery.

In 2006 she moved to Ireland to live with family. She died on 9 February 2021, aged ninety-two, at a nursing home in Fermoy, where she lived with her daughter. In 2017 the National Museums of Kenya had named her Artist of the Month.