Founder of Yegoarts.
I was born in Burundi in 1985, into a family of musicians. My father and three of my uncles were at the center of the music scene in Bujumbura, the capital city, and our house was their rehearsal room. Younger musicians came to our home to study. The sound of these lessons, and my father's improvisations on the guitar filled the house since as long as I can remember. One of my uncles was also a painter, and so the house doubled as a painting studio as well. I would sit beside him for hours, watching him work.
As an adult, I returned to Rwanda, and began to carve out a life for myself. One day, by chance, I was introduced to a group of visual artists at a studio called Ivuka-seeing their work was my first encounter with abstract paintings that looked and felt uniquely African in style. I began coming to the studio to sit quietly and watch the studio's founder paint. Then, each night, I would go home and begin to paint by myself. One day, I brought the five paintings that I had created to Ivuka. All of the artists thought I had been painting for many years, and the founder invited me to join the studio.
 
Before long, my work began to sell. I was driven by the desire to find a style that was utterly distinct from anything I had every seen-something that expressed the worlds I came from in a way that felt completely my own. Over time, I got tired of the common studio model in Kigali, where the leaders of the studios earned most of the money, and left artists without opportunities to develop their craft. I took all of the money I had made from the sale of my paintings, and rented a run-down house near an affluent area of Kigali. I organized a group of artists and members of the community, and over the course of several months, we completely transformed the building. We re-painted the entire house with white walls in the gallery and brightly colored collaborative murals on the gate and the outside walls. We replaced the dusty lot in front of the house with a garden of installations, with straw chairs where people from the community could come to sit and talk. We remodeled the back of the building into a communal workspace, and I bought paint for all of the artists to allow them to begin working immediately.
 
Today, the studio (named Yego Arts-the word means "yes" in Kinyarwanda) counts ten well-established painters from Rwanda, they are working, studying art, and beginning to sell paintings of their own. Our mission is to create a vibrant, self-sustaining community of established visual artists in Rwanda, and to create new avenues for Rwandans to use the arts as a means of healing and generating sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their children.