Wangari Mathenge: Re-membering at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Wangari Mathenge was born in Nairobi in 1973 and moved to London with her family as a young child. She later studied law in Washington, DC, and practiced in Massachusetts before turning to painting and earning an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She now lives and works in Nairobi and Buckinghamshire, England. Her paintings place figures and groups in domestic settings, filling the rooms with objects that carry personal meaning or act as cultural markers, and they often return to the diasporic experience. Recent museum appearances include the Nasher Museum at Duke, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Dallas Museum of Art and LACMA, and her work is held by institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Re-membering is her first solo exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan and the first time she has shown sculpture publicly. The title comes from a series she began in fall 2024, prompted by Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 2009 book Something Torn and New, which examines the effects of colonialism and slavery on Africans at home and abroad, along with strategies of resistance and recovery. Mathenge spent months studying Kenyan colonial literature and cultural objects from 1900 to 1963, the year of independence, to understand how history and her own identity were shaped. The first cycle of canvases, dated 2025, offered colorful overhead views of solitary, contemplative figures surrounded by books, objects and textiles.

The five new paintings here move from reflection to action. Women, each a stand-in for the artist, occupy vivid domestic interiors in a 1960s setting, handling, altering and rebuilding the things around them. That decade followed the liberation of many African nations and brought a cultural shift. Works include Re-membering XII (The Wednesday Women's Club), 2026, an oil on canvas of roughly 72 by 90 inches, and Re-membering XI (To Leave This Steady Unendurable Land), 2026, a square canvas of about 63 inches.

The two sculptures extend the imagery into three dimensions. Re-membering VIII (Before Us, After Us, Ever Changing), 2025–26, hangs a densely worked macramé textile from a doorframe carved by artisans in Malindi. It draws on the nineteenth-century carved doors of the East African coast, notably those in Lamu Old Town, the oldest preserved Swahili settlement, which signaled an owner's status and trade connections. The textile suggests an unnamed landscape assembled from fragments. Re-membering IX (The Shape of Inheritance), 2025–26, is a voluminous knitted piece on a dress form, based on the memory of a historical Gikuyu garment, the community to which Mathenge belongs. It combines the ochre and cinnamon tones of traditional leather clothing with colonial-era forms such as the Victorian bustle and train, and the figure gradually gives way to terrain toward the hem. Family and community members helped with the knitting, making the work a collective act.

The show occupies the ground floor of 19 East 64th Street on the Upper East Side and runs from September 17 to October 24, 2026.