On the occasion of Expo Chicago 2025, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new paintings by Chicago-based, Kenyan artist Wangari Mathenge.
In a new body of work titled Re-Membering, Mathenge delves into an expansive study of Kenyan, specifically Kikuyu, culture, history, and language within a social and political context profoundly and open-endedly impacted by the legacy of colonialism. By researching traditional African artefacts and reading the biographies of both Indigenous peoples and colonisers, Mathenge has taken part in a continual process of rebuilding her family’s cultural memory, working against the intergenerational erasure that results when traditional practices are usurped by the monolithic structures and supremacy mindset of settler colonialism. The series draws inspiration from Kenyan academic Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s 2009 book, Something Torn and New, which explores Europhonism, the dismemberment of African memory through the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones, in an attempt to assimilate and eliminate ancestral traditions.
Re-Membering marks a development in Mathenge’s relationship to her diasporic identity, building upon the visual language of her ongoing series, The Ascendants, begun in 2019. In The Ascendants, the artist portrays intimate snapshots of figures in domestic spaces, rooms that are richly decorated with East African Kanga fabrics, symbols of global immigration and relocation. In Re-Membering, Mathenge’s compositions are increasingly full, visual manifestations of the sheer wealth of information that the artist has gathered in her latest period of research. In these new works Mathenge makes explicit her process of active remembrance, showing the tools and markers of her path to self-understanding. In seeking a history that reaches beyond the colonial narrative the artist aims to go back in time to assess and remember, creating a site of personal experience that connects her to her ancestors beyond the spoken word, and a wider project of cultural revival, capturing what is lost in times of immense change.
Wangari Mathenge (b. 1973, Nairobi, Kenya) lives and works between Chicago, IL, and Nairobi, Kenya. She holds degrees from Howard University and Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. She is currently included in When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, Dallas Museum of Art, TX; When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Bozar, Brussels, touring from Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2024) and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2022); and Through Their Eyes: Selections from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, CA.
Recent group exhibitions include Black American Portraits, first mounted at LACMA, CA before travelling to Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN (2022-2024); The Power of Portraiture, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2022); Stretching the Body, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2021-22); and Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami, FL (2020-21). Recent solo exhibitions include Nicola Vassell, New York, NY (2024); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023, 2021); Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2023, 2019); Monica de Cardenas, Milan, Italy (2021); and The Sacristy Gallery, Chicago, IL (2021).
Collections include Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Muzeum Susch, Switzerland; Jorge M. Peréz Collection, Miami, FL; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Kistefos Museum, Oslo; Elie Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.
