Affiliate of Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design targets work by starting artists ARTS | NATHAN KIWERE | The age-old maxim attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson goes, “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mouse trap than his neighbours, though …
Read More »COMMENT: Totems under threat
How failure to share family cultural history endangers symbols that represent common ancestral origin COMMENT | NATHAN KIWERE | Writing on page 137 of his book, ‘The Baganda’ (Macmillan and Co., 1911), John Roscoe, a British colonial historian, states that when animals were becoming scarce, Kintu, with the general consent of …
Read More »ARTS: Copycat art
Lack of originality of vision, spontaneity of expression It is a truism that art does not exist in a vacuum; it is built on a synergy of ideas and approaches within a community. Art production is informed by a culture or sub culture. Whereas there is an obvious element of …
Read More »Tough search for `Ugandan art’
“What constitutes Ugandan art?” is what inquiring minds are asking artists flaunting their so-called Ugandan art. Sometimes the question is framed differently. How much of that art actually is Ugandan? This in consideration that the art may be made of oil paints made in Germany, canvas made in China, and …
Read More »Monuments of valour
A universal urge to immortalise persons and achievements The urge to put a human face to national achievements with a view to immortalise the person’s association to the achievement appears universal. The avenue mostly used in this enterprise is monumental art in recognition of its latent power to influence mindsets …
Read More »ARTS: True value of Ugandan art abstract
A painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt recently became the third most expensive artwork ever sold at auction in Europe. `Bauerngarten’, Gustav Klimt’s exuberant 1907 oil painting of a garden filled with poppies, daisies, and other flowers, sold for £48 million (Approx Shs212 billion) at Sotheby’s auction of Impressionist, Modern …
Read More »Nnaggenda’s neo-traditionalism gets another life
During the 1970s heady days of then President Idi Amin’s political upheavals, many artists of means fled into self-exile. Prof. Francis Xavier Nnaggenda, arguably the greatest sculptor Uganda has produced, moved in the opposite direction. After a stint in Indiana and Texas in USA and Nairobi in Kenya, Nnaggenda returned …
Read More »ARTS: Mugalu’s heartbeat and sound of colour
“Learn to listen to silence, and you will discover it is music,” so goes an old African maxim. The statement connotes an oxymoron as listening to silent sound is inconceivable to many people. It is even more so with something as inanimate as colour. Yet some artists will attempt to …
Read More »ART: Uganda through Miller’s lens
There is something about Uganda that fascinates as well as it baffles, especially foreign eyes. It appears that the much touted mantra of “gifted by nature” strikes more of a chord among foreigners than Ugandans. Could it be that Ugandans are caught in the rut of the old adage, “familiarity …
Read More »BOOK REVIEW: Footprints of the Outsider
Many readers will easily relate with the realism in Julius Ocwinyo’s latest novel Julius Ocwinyo is arguably among Uganda’s literary luminaries, thanks to his three major fictional works that include the much acclaimed ‘Fate of the Banished’ (1997) that featured quite prominently in Uganda’s literature syllabus at university level, ‘The …
Read More »