The retrospective Sane Wadu: I Hope So was the inaugural Kenyan show of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) (Fig. 1). It was plentiful in themes of self-reflection, self-parody, resistance and Wadu's artistic brilliance. In a career spanning forty years, the painter, educator, and poet (b. 1954) initially depicted everyday struggles and ideals of the lives of ordinary Kenyans in watercolor and oil paint. After five years of painting fulltime, Wadu started to reveal wider sociopolitical “manifestos”—often satirical—in impasto oil paint. Viewers of this retrospective were constantly implored to reevaluate their own understanding of Kenyan histories and narratives through Wadu's lens.
Originally named Walter Njuguna Mbugua, Wadu renamed himself Sane Mbugua Wadu as a typically wry response to his critics who labelled him “insane” for leaving a stable job as a teacher to make art that “did not fit” what gallerists were looking for in the 1980s (...