Inside Uweza Art Gallery in Olympic estate. Photo: Uweza Foundation
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Uweza Art Gallery: the Olympic estate house where young Kibera painters keep 60 per cent.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects' own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
Uweza Art Gallery is the art programme of the Uweza Foundation, a non-profit founded in 2008 whose name comes from the Swahili for ability or opportunity. It started in November 2011 as an art class in one room of the Uweza Community Centre in Kibera. The gallery opened in 2013 in a shipping container and since January 2019 has been in a two-storey house, House 4, in Olympic estate.
How the money works
Artists get 60 per cent of every sale. If they are under 18, the money goes to school fees. The other 40 per cent covers rent and materials, and the gallery says it has been self-sustaining from sales since 2018. It supports about 20 young artists, and older Uweza artists teach children's classes at the weekend. Wesley Osoro, who joined those classes in 2011, is now the gallery's best-selling artist and one of its teachers. The gallery manager, Francis Okoth, has lived in Kibera all his life.
Shows and murals
In January 2019 the gallery took Fikiria, a show of work by artists aged 13 to 26, to the Parabola Arts Centre in Cheltenham, England. In May 2022 ten Uweza artists showed more than 20 paintings at ROAM Gallery in North Adams, Massachusetts. "The students have a way with colour and form that is very powerful," ROAM's Xtina Parks said. The same year the artists painted Tiba Ni Sisi (The Cure Is Us) COVID-19 murals across Kibera with Safe Hands Kenya.
The gallery marked its tenth anniversary in December 2021 at Kofisi 9 in Nairobi; Kofisi Africa has bought more than 100 pieces. In 2023 and 2024 it ran a 12-week art-and-business course with the EU, the British Council and HEVA under the Ignite Culture programme, and 42 artists completed it in 2024. That year the gallery sold 138 paintings, helped by a Lonely Planet feature on Kenya.
Sources: Uweza Foundation; Uweza, 4 Dec 2021; Uweza mid-year report, Oct 2024; Gavi VaccinesWork, 20 May 2022; Uweza, 14 May 2024; Punchline Gloucester, 16 Jan 2019; Borgen Project, 3 Jun 2019.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects’ own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
Uweza Art Gallery is the art programme of the Uweza Foundation, a non-profit founded in 2008 whose name comes from the Swahili for ability or opportunity. It started in November 2011 as an art class in one room of the Uweza Community Centre in Kibera. The gallery opened in 2013 in a shipping container and since January 2019 has been in a two-storey house, House 4, in Olympic estate.
How the money works
Artists get 60 per cent of every sale. If they are under 18, the money goes to school fees. The other 40 per cent covers rent and materials, and the gallery says it has been self-sustaining from sales since 2018. It supports about 20 young artists, and older Uweza artists teach children’s classes at the weekend. Wesley Osoro, who joined those classes in 2011, is now the gallery’s best-selling artist and one of its teachers. The gallery manager, Francis Okoth, has lived in Kibera all his life.
Shows and murals
In January 2019 the gallery took Fikiria, a show of work by artists aged 13 to 26, to the Parabola Arts Centre in Cheltenham, England. In May 2022 ten Uweza artists showed more than 20 paintings at ROAM Gallery in North Adams, Massachusetts. “The students have a way with colour and form that is very powerful,” ROAM’s Xtina Parks said. The same year the artists painted Tiba Ni Sisi (The Cure Is Us) COVID-19 murals across Kibera with Safe Hands Kenya.
The gallery marked its tenth anniversary in December 2021 at Kofisi 9 in Nairobi; Kofisi Africa has bought more than 100 pieces. In 2023 and 2024 it ran a 12-week art-and-business course with the EU, the British Council and HEVA under the Ignite Culture programme, and 42 artists completed it in 2024. That year the gallery sold 138 paintings, helped by a Lonely Planet feature on Kenya.
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
