By Margaretta wa Gacheru (written 12.27.2022)
Jeffie Magina started building Umoja 1’s first sports and arts centre back in 2011.
“We wanted to create a place for artists who felt frustrated being rejected by the galleries on the other side of town,” Magina told BDLife shortly before Christmas. He was standing in his new Umoja 1 Recreation Centre which was opened in September of 2021.
Combining sports and art is something the culture ministry has been doing for years. It also made sense to Magina who combined a small boxing ring with a space for young artists to exhibit their works as well.
“But that space wasn’t large enough to meet all our needs,” says the mentor of a multitude of children from the neighborhood. “We were teaching art on the weekends, so we needed more space for the kids,” he adds.
Thus, by January 2020, Magina was breaking rocky ground in a space basically considered unfit for construction. “We built our new place with rocks and mabati [corrugated scrap metal];” he recalls. “Plus, we asked [Meshak] Oiro to come help us weld the metal pipes that’d define the parameters of the centre itself.”
The Umoja 1 Recreation Centre officially opened last September of 2021, complete with a boxing ring, a ping pong table area, and mabati walls fit for exhibiting art whenever an occasion arose.
That time came right before the Christmas holiday when the first art exhibition inaugurated the centre, curated by Njogu Kuria. ‘Boobology’ was a group show but it mainly centred around the vision of Kuria who claims he has been ‘fascinated by boobs’ for as long as he can recall.
Kuria is an artist who historically has painted using mixed media, including acrylic paints and old vinyl ‘45’ disks. I thought perhaps his ‘fascination’ was sparked by the similarity between a woman’s breast and the ‘45’ which is also round with a hole in the centre rather like a woman’s nipple.
But no, Kuria says he has always been intrigued by that particular anatomical part and decided to display a portion of his study of women’s breasts in a series of works that are controversial at least and outrageous at best.
Kuria also invited an array of other local artists to be part of his showcase. Among them are Allan ‘Think’ Kioko, Hannington Gwanzu, Martin Musyoka, James Kagima, Austin Adika, Mau Kamau, Jongo K, and Jeffie Magina. But the majority of works were by Kuria, some of which were distasteful to me, others I found disturbing or downright ugly.
But then, I recall the uproarious impact that one 19th century nude by Edouard Manet had, and I decide to write about Boobology anyway. Manet’s ‘Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe’ (The Luncheon on the Grass) was also rejected by the leading critics of his day. The oil painting of a naked woman having a picnic with two fully dressed men and another scantily dressed woman bathing in the background caused a scandal when it was first presented to the esteemed Salon in 1863 in Paris. But today, that same work resides permanently in the prestigious Musee d’Orsay (Orsay Museum) in Paris. An earlier version of the same subject is also hanging in central London at the Courtauld Gallery.
The reality is that nudes have been a source of artistic inspiration for centuries going back to antiquity. What’s more, one of the most famous sculptures in art history is Michelangelo’s statue of David, which is a nude beautifully chiseled and considered one of the finest sculptures in the world.
This is not to say that I can compare Kuria’s nudes to Manet’s or Michelangelo’s nudes. But before one is hasty in condemning Kuria’s concept, I have to say that introducing art to children in Umoja is a gift.
It's really Jeffie Magina who deserves the praise for creating a spacious venue in an ‘under-served’ area of Nairobi where sports and art are combined. One may find it incongruous to see artworks hung all around a boxing ring or a ping pong table. But one can just as easily applaud Magina for opening up a space where children can see all sorts of culture, both art and sports.
Magina has also made room behind his Centre where he has children planting trees and other herbs. So in a place that looks like it is barren of creative expression, Magina has ensured that artists and sportsmen and women from Eastlands have an arena where they can recreate their own concept of culture.
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