No sanctuary for Kamwathi's'mamas on queue

NO SANCTUARY FOR KAMWATHI'S'MAMAS ON QUEUE" Nairobi, Friday BY MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

A sanctuary is meant to be a safe haven, a space of security and assurance that all is well. That is why a Northern Ireland-based church named the project they established for disabled children living in the slums of Nyeri the Metropolitan Sanctuary for Sick Children, Kenya.
But the exhibition entitled "Sanctuary: home, away, the common ground (Part 1)" turned out to be no sanctuary for the work of Peterson Kamwathi, one of Kenya's most esteemed young artists.

The exhibition opened last Tuesday night (July 26) at the Nairobi National Museum, featuring works by mostly benevolent British artists and three Kenyans, but no Kamwathi.
His art had disappeared!

No one is prepared to make accusations, least of all the artist who is crest-fallen for having handed in his own bold interpretation of sanctuary the previous Wednesday to the exhibition's English curator Annabelle Hulbert.

Hulbert said at the show's opening that she assembled all the artwork that day and placed it in a corner of the spacious upstairs Museum hall. But rather than hand the works over to Museum curator Lydia Galauv for lock-and-key safe keeping, the naive Briton simply left all the works out in the open air.

The result is a mystery and an apparent art theft, Kenya's first major heist of high art!
The absence of Kamwathi's painting overshadowed the event featuring other Kenyan artists, including Prina Shah, James Mbuthia and Annabel Wanjiku Reeno.

It overshadowed the innovative art works by the British artists, Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Lindsay Duncanson, Holger Lonze, Michael Taylor, Hulbert herself and even the collaborative art paper project produced by Cecilia Stephens and the Sanctuary Artists Papermaking Workshop.

Unfortunately, it even dampened one's appreciation of the amazing cardboard and flour chair project that now produces chairs specially suited for disabled youth and manned by the mothers who were taught how to construct means for their kids to sit upright (often for the first time) by another British volunteer Joleen Allen. All the chairs are sponsored by Irish well-wishers from the Belfast-based Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle.

The crime is no reflection on the church and least of all on Dr. James McConnel who first opened the Sanctuary to treat children suffering from illnesses including cerebral palsy, spine bifida, dwarfism, autism, TB, Rickets, HIV-AIDS and even in some cases, sexual abuse.
Nor is Museum curator Lydia Galavu taking the wrap for the disappearance of one of Kamwathi's classic "Cue" series, a series he has been developing ever since his historic "Sitting Allowance" exhibition held at the Goethe Institute back in 2009.

"We made it clear to [Hulbert] in our email that we were prepared to store all the artwork for her, but she never handed it over to us," Galavu said on opening night.

Hopes are that the missing painting will be retrieved, but in the meantime, the public is baffled. Off-hand comments include the notion that the theft was "an inside job." But as of opening night, the cops had not been called in.
The Sanctuary exhibition runs through the end of September and then will go on tour to the UK, first to London's Breunei Gallery and then on to Belfast.

In the meantime, the innovative work of Nyeri mothers who have learned to make art paper out of everything from cow dung and banana leaves to wilted flowers and sikuma wiki will continue. Hulbert is committed to creating markets for the mothers' art paper output.

And the free physiotheraphy treatment for Nyeri slum kids with disabilities will continue, only without the revenue that Kamwathi could have given once he had sold his own painting for a tidy sum. After holding four one-man shows, exhibiting and/or studying everywhere from Holland, UK, US, Denmark, Senegal, South Africa and of course, Kenya, Kamwathi has honed his work into a fine art that explains why even a crook hanging around the National Museum would appreciate the value of Kamwathi's work.

Galavu and others are still holding out the hope that the painting has simply been misplaced, and it will reappear sometime soon. But in the interim, the mystery of the missing "Mamas on Queue" is yet to be solved.