Artists

Kenyan painter Kaloki Nyamai draws on quotidian life in Nairobi — where he was raised and continues to work — as the foundation for a practice rooted in ancestral storytelling. Shaped by his grandmother's accounts of the Kamba people, a Bantu ethnic group of eastern Kenya, Nyamai builds richly layered compositions using acrylic paint, sisal rope, photo transfers, and burnt rubber yarn. His abstracted figures — dancing, embracing, swimming, and interlocking hands — emerge and recede across the picture plane like fragments of memory, while embedded newsprint transfers preserve pivotal and often violent moments in African history. Through the act of stitching and layering, Nyamai proposes a powerful counterpoint to singular postcolonial narratives, likening the formal gesture to symbolically mending a fractured community.

Nyamai pursued formal training at the BiFa Institute of Fine Arts in Nairobi, and has exhibited internationally at the Norval Foundation, Galerie Barbara Thumm (Berlin), The Speed Art Museum (Kentucky), and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, among others. He has participated in the Kenyan Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the Dakar Biennale (2022), and the 16th Sharjah Biennial (2025), and debuted a monumental triptych at Art Basel Unlimited in 2023. His work is held in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Fondation H, Madagascar. In 2023, Nyamai founded the Kamene Art Residency in Nairobi, supporting artistic growth and cross-cultural exchange.