Wangari Mathenge was 31 and working as a lawyer in Massachusetts when she began to take art classes. “I was always good at art,” she says. “And I thought I’d go to art school, but my parents had other ideas.” So she studied business instead, and then law, leaving Nairobi for Washington.
“One day I was feeling a bit out of sorts, so I bought some crayons and some paper. At first I just made work for myself and then I started taking classes.” And after a decade or so, her art teacher suggested she quit her job and go back to college. “That was the realisation that art should be my full-time gig.”
Fast forward to 2021 and Mathenge, now 48, is not just a postgraduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but has US and UK gallery representation, collectors agog for her paintings and a first solo show in London. Its centrepiece is a life-size reconstruction of the living room of her family’s home in London in the 1970s, when her father was working for the Commonwealth Secretariat, that provides a context for her paintings, large-format figurative works based on old photographs of herself and her relatives.
“I don’t want them to be seen as portraits,” she says. “I’m not searching for their aura or their personality, though that being said, likeness always creeps in.” Rather her interest is in Africans abroad, what she calls “African life beyond colonialism” and why “the word expatriate is exclusively reserved as a qualifier for white western migrants and never in relation to the African migrant. Even when it’s apt, it’s never used.”
If she brings a lawyer’s forensic eye to her art, it’s not at the expense of beauty. And why shouldn’t the two connect? “It’s just been a natural progression,” she says of her career to date. “I always say that if something is meant to be then you don’t even have to fight for it. It will just happen. There was no planning or plotting. Art just consumed me.”
