banana hill ---draft

 

There’s a Grand Reunion going on right now up at the banana hill Art Gallery where more than a dozen of the first, second, and third generation of Banana Hill artists responded to Shine Tani’s call to come and be part of a group exhibition that he called____

Many were there when the Banana Hill studio officially became a gallery in 1996. Quite a few were active members when the BH Studio took off in 1994. And there were some who were with Shine even before the studio came into being, like his wife Rahab. They were among the up-and-coming artists who played their part, by necessity to encourage Shine to recognize his latent potential to teach, preach and promote KENYAN art when few people even imagined that any such thing apart from curios, baskets, and other crafts. These boiled down to being abused dismissively as ‘souvenir art’, absolutely unrelated to contemporarily African art, such as what existed in west Africa.

It’s a cultural battle still being fought today. But the smarter Kenyan artists don’t bother with those battles. They’ve realized its more important to work, and prove their critics wrong by allowing them to see Kenyan art for themselves.

Unfortunately, some of the earliest to be inspired by Shine were either family or close friends who either died or moved out into other kinds of work. “But as the seventh-born in my family, I was inspired by my two older brothers, Henry Mungai who died and Joseph Karisha,” Shine told BD Life last weekend. “We were from Ngecha, and many people say Henry was the first Ngecha artist to take his art seriously>” he adds. Many Ngecha artists followed after Henry, like Wanyu Brush, Chain Muhandi, Sebastion Kiarie, Allan Githuka, Julius Kimemiah, Martin Muhoro, Joseph Kamundia, Jeff Wambugu, --------, and Peter Kibunga, all of whose paintings at the Gallery for this historic showcase.

There were others who were with shine in the beginning, but moved on.” Shine recalled, “Meek Gichugu now lives in Paris but initially, he was with us,” he adds. James Mbuthia was also part of the BH Studio at one time as was John Silver Kimani and Joseph Cartoon. Mbuthia moved on to work with One Off gallery and Ramoma while Silver Moved to Kuona trust, and Cartoon went solo.

The local art scene has been very fluid and ever-changing, but definitely developing, and evolving. It’s happening among Kenyan artists everywhere, but probably the best illustration of that fact at BH can be seen in the paintings of Rahab Njambi Shine. Several of her early works are in the exhibition. So are a couple more contemporary ones that will show the tremendous change that she continues to go through.    

Shine’s paintings are also in the exhibition. But ever since he agreed to take charge and ownership of the BHG (rather than let the whole thing flop) he also knew he was becoming Kenya’s first African owner of an art institution, and that was a full-time job.  So he has much less time to devote to his painting, “But I’m come back to it this year,” he promised. That is also true of gifted artists like martin kamuyu and Martin Muhoro who nearly drown themselves to death in booze, but now are finally on the way back to sobriety and their art as a form of creative therapy.

In the meantime, artists from all over central province And beyond were (FLOCKING TO) finding their way to BH. For instance, there was kamuyu from Naivasha, Andrew kamundia from Ruai, Leonard Ndure from Dagoretti, and Doreen Mweni from Nakuru, and even Rahab Njambi was from Lari, not     Banana hill or ngecha. Finally, the most recent member of the bh family is Vincent shikuku, from Bungoma, in western kenya.

It was ruth Schaffner of gallery watatu who first fell under the spell of  Ngecha artists whose quantity and quality were inexplicably