Kabiito Richard's paintings: a local reinvention in a global perspective

African Arts, Summer, 2004 by Sunanda K. Sanyal

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The pictorial artifice of Ssengendo's images, however, cannot overshadow their distinctly narrative gesture--a sense of telling a story. Not only do their titles betray the subjects, but the subjects themselves carry enough specificity to conjure stories. And evaluated along this line, the two of Kabiito's paintings we have seen are also unable to distance themselves from a discernable narrative scheme. Despite their transformation into visual motifs, the images are still evocative of identifiable referents: a man in a recognizable dress and a renowned monument; and needless to say, the transparent titles provide obvious clues to this end. This task of making narrative more ambiguous, more indeterminate, is something that the second group of paintings accomplishes; but it is crucial to first have a brief look at the ways the Art School has interpreted the role of narrative in representation through the decades in order to understand the images from a historical perspective.

Pictorial Narrative in the Art School's History

An English artist and art teacher trained at the Slade School, Margaret Trowell (1904-1985) founded Makerere's Art School in 1937. Like many Europeans of her generation in contact with Africa, Trowell believed that Africans had an essentially unique way of thinking and that the continent was rapidly losing its pristine way of life on contact with Europe, a view that led her to volunteer for the fledgling Kampala Museum (now Uganda National Museum) during much of the 1940s (Trowell 1957:106, 115), working first as an honorary curator and then as a member of the trustees. Her rigorous work at the Museum was hardly an isolated event, as what she learned about Uganda's material cultures from her curatorial efforts had significant impact on her teaching. She occasionally invited traditional experts to demonstrate basket-making, pottery, and weaving and insisted that her students be aware of the aesthetic value of local artifacts.

Trowell's enthusiasm for indigenous artifacts had its limitations, however. Trowell wanted her students to know about local material cultures insofar as that knowledge made them aware of the value of their traditions and provided means of livelihood through teaching in elementary schools or producing objects for the market. (5) But when it came to art-making, she maintained very different standards: She neither encouraged appropriation of local motifs or artifacts to make pictures or sculptures, nor mentioned any such possibility in her elaborate discussions of art teaching in Africa (see Trowell 1937, 1951-52). The reason for this was her strong aversion to modernism. Trowell disliked what she saw as the "synthetic formalism" of much of modern Western art; since use of traditional elements in the making of pictures would inevitably invite formal experiments--"soulless superficiality" as she called it--she kept her art instruction completely segregated from her teaching of craft (Trowell 1957:123-4). In short, she maintained a strict separation in practice, if not in theory, between "art" and "craft."