upon meeting him, he would pull from his uniform pocket photographs of himself dressed in his Samburu traditional clothes, saying“ This is not me( in his askari uniform), this is me”. Claudette was amused and befriended him as he was always there at the house. Her sculpture was about him, and we brought him to see it, and I took a photograph of him standing next to the sculpture. The idea was, here is the sculpture and here is the real Thomas, he lives in the city but his heart is still at home Danda: Was he delighted?
Rob: Yes he was. It was a brilliant piece and a great place for it. Around the same time we had set up this big billboard installation with a Dutch painter. He was travelling, but other artists did a new painting everyday on the billboard. Patrick Mukabi and Thom Ogonga took up the project and continued for a while after the Dutchman whose concept it was left. The billboard was near the Dutch Embassy by Uchumi House so we could get a wire from the Dutch Embassy to power the lighting.
Danda: Is that when did the Dutch Embassy started supporting Kuona? Rob: It all happened just after Wasanii I. Their new programme officer offered to fund us to hire and train art administrators and to run a few projects. It was mostly running costs we needed, and that enabled me to hire Lina Karingi and Judy Ogana as our arts administrators, and it gave me a salary as well. He funded a course that was run at the museum by S. African university tutors to train art administrators. There were about 24 people, most of them were museum staff with Judy, Lina and
Patricia from Kuona. The thing that strikes me now, and even then at the time, was that very quickly we started dealing with a completely different community of artists. I hadn’ t really thought who would use the space, then soon there were people who I hadn’ t met before, people who hadn’ t yet made any commercial success in the art scene.
Danda: Like Richard Kimathi, for example, when did he come? Rob: He came quite early on. Theresa Musoke brought him. She was a good friend from the beginning; she welcomed the thought of an alternative art setup; Kuona was a new kind of space which was very well situated, active, and where lots of people who visited the museum would flood in and out. It was easy to attract people and to get visitors to come. The traffic wasn’ t so bad those days. It was just great and it was incredibly fortunate, the thing that happened to that young next generation.
Danda: Soi calls them the second generation … You are a third now( to Gor). Rob: The second generation, exactly- they came from nowhere and discovered there was a place they could call
Section1: Technical
home. Here was a place where you could make it. You could find a buyer. You could make some congenial friends, and if you were any good, you might find yourself on a trip to Zambia. It went far beyond a lot of guys’ expectations.
Danda: You didn’ t give hand outs. Rob: No, we didn’ t. We didn’ t do that, but maybe we should have asked a little bit more from the artists because one of the reasons Kuona went through a really difficult time a few years later was because we had so few rules and it really wasn’ t clear really whose was Kuona. Was it an Institution? Was it a club? Was it just a building? Was it the artists themselves? I think we failed to define that either for ourselves, or for the people who became part of the community there. There was a core group of guys there everyday, and then there was this very large group of people who would come and go.
Danda: Who were the core? Rob: All those guys I mentioned: Thom, Jimmy, Kyalo, Ogira to some extent.
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