Nairobi Now, Nairobi Next

“I would not say I became an artist; I was born an artist,” declares Sane Wadu in a video commissioned to mark the opening of his landmark retrospective exhibition, I Hope So: Sane Wadu, in Nairobi. Wadu’s work fell off the radar and was only exhibited intermittently at now-defunct commercial galleries across the country until the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) decided to mount an exhibition covering the artist’s work from 1984 to date. The show also happens to be NCAI’s first and is a bold undertaking for a nonprofit art space still in its infancy.

NCAI’s commitment to the “growth and preservation” of East African contemporary art is ambitious and expansive. At the January opening of I Hope So, artist Michael Armitage— the driving force behind the gallery’s creation—remarked on the “extraordinary accomplishment” the event represented, alluding to the tangible impact the space already has had on Nairobi’s artistic community and to the mammoth task of bringing the space and the exhibition into fruition. The decision to locate NCAI in a half-occupied shoppi…